The Final Silence (13 page)

Graham bought the house not long after Rea was born. A nice place in a cul-de-sac off Balmoral Avenue, in the BT9 area, where the hoity-toits lived, as Ida’s mother would have said. A 1930s detached villa with a detached garage and a driveway, five bedrooms if you counted the one Graham used for his office, two receptions plus a dining room. Ida had felt a delicious thrill when they viewed it for the first time more than thirty years ago, knowing they could afford such a home. Such luxury, such a beautiful place to raise their daughter.

And all for nothing.

Ida held her hands together in her lap, her coat still buttoned over her nightdress since she’d come home an hour and a half ago. The phone had rung almost constantly. She’d switched her mobile off, but the landline kept trilling like a demented bird. The newspapers. The radio stations. The television reporters. They all had the number, ready to get a comment about whatever stories they thought Graham Carlisle would have an opinion on. Now they were scratching at the doors like hungry dogs, looking for scraps of grief to devour.

Ghouls, all of them.

Worry had got the better of Ida at eleven the night before. She had called Rea’s mobile half a dozen times, left three messages, and no reply. One of the girls Rea shared a house with answered the landline there, told her sleepily that Rea wasn’t in her room, that no one had seen her all evening. Graham had dismissed Ida’s concerns, said Rea was probably out on the town somewhere, but their daughter had given up that kind of carry-on years ago.

So, at one-thirty in the morning, when Graham was asleep, Ida had gone downstairs, put shoes on her feet and her coat on over her nightdress, and then went out to her car.

Raymond’s semi-detached house stood as quiet as it was dark. When Ida saw Rea’s little Nissan wasn’t parked outside, she almost drove back home. But instead, she pulled in, shut her engine off and got out of the car.

Thinking about it now, she remembered the soft sound of distant traffic as she approached the front door. The whisper of it spilling over the rooftops to this peaceful little road. And she thought how lovely a place this would be for Rea to live, if she could get over what was in that awful book.

The key opened the lock without resistance, just the smooth rotation of the tumblers, but Ida had to put her shoulder against the door to push it open. All was grey and black. She kept her fingertips on the wall as she made her way down the hallway, her leg brushing against the bin bags and boxes that still lay there, until they found the light switch.

Ida blinked against the glare of the bare bulb overhead.

‘Rea?’ she called.

Realising her voice rang through the street, she went back to the door and pushed it closed. She turned and looked up the stairs.

Rea stared back down, her head resting on the top step, trickles of red falling away.

It felt to Ida that her mind had split in two at that moment. One half wondering why Rea was just lying there, why didn’t she get up out of that paint she’d spilled? The other knowing beyond all certainty that her daughter was dead. She had stood there, trapped between her two selves, unable to move or speak for a minute or a lifetime, she couldn’t be sure.

The following hours bled into one hellish smear. Ida could only recall them as a series of still images, tableaux of the end of the world. She couldn’t remember whom she’d called first – Graham or an ambulance – but the paramedic arrived before anyone else. A man wearing green and yellow high visibility overalls. Ida saw the SUV with its fluorescent decals as she opened the door to him. The paramedic saw Rea over her shoulder, said almost nothing, and climbed up to her.

Ida watched him crouched on the steps, feeling, listening, shining a tiny torch into Rea’s eyes. Then he stayed quiet and still for a while before taking a phone from his pocket and calling someone.

Graham arrived at the same time as the ambulance.

The crew entered first. The paramedic looked down at them and shook his head.

It was then that Ida fell.

The rest was a stream of flashing lights and questions, policewomen with notepads, offers of water, cups of tea, assurances, whispers, a hundred secrets being kept from her by the seemingly thousands of people who came and went in those hours.

Graham had driven Ida home.

He stopped outside an off-licence, got out of the car, and went inside. Graham had given up alcohol more than thirty years ago. Not a drop, not even a glass of sherry at Christmas.

While she sat there waiting, Ida realised two things. First, that Graham had barely spoken to her in all the hours since his arrival at Raymond’s house. Second, that she had not gone to Rea, had not touched her, had not held her. She hadn’t even put a foot on the stairs.

‘What kind of mother am I?’ she asked the empty car.

It came at her then, all of it, as one great wall of fear and grief and regret and pain, every piece falling on her at once. She howled until her throat burned.

Then Ida felt the car rock on its suspension as Graham climbed in, felt a bottle drop at her feet, and heard the engine cough into life. She had recovered herself by the time the car was moving through the traffic. Searching her pockets, she found a crumpled tissue and dabbed the tears from her cheeks.

She and Graham didn’t speak as he parked in their driveway, as they climbed out of the car, as he unlocked their door, as they entered their home. Already the phone was ringing.

Graham went to the kitchen, the bottle of whiskey in his hand. Ida went to the good room, the tissue in hers.

And here she sat, quiet and still, a rage burning in her like a bright electric filament, an anger like she’d never felt before.

FLANAGAN WALKED TOWARDS
her temporary office, a bundle of files under one arm, her jacket under the other. They’d stuck her away in the darkest corner of the station, her only view the gravel-covered roof of the adjoining block and a string of utility buildings. God-awful sixties architecture, all straight lines and concrete.

A suited man stood waiting at her door, leaning on the frame, his arms folded. His head tilted as he watched her approach, like a predator unsure whether to eat or play with its victim. She stopped several feet short of him.

‘DCI Flanagan, I presume,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, not taking his extended hand. It dropped back to his side.

‘DCI Dan Hewitt,’ he said. ‘C3.’

Her mind stumbled in confusion. But Dr Prunty told me it was C5, she almost said, malignant. Then she understood. He was C3, Intelligence Branch. Confusion gave way to suspicion.

Flanagan swallowed and took a breath, hoping she hadn’t revealed too much of herself.

‘What can I do for you?’ she asked.

‘Jack Lennon’s downstairs in an interview room, waiting for you,’ he said.

‘That’s right. I’m just dropping off some things, then I’m heading down there.’

She had been standing at the top of the stairs in Deramore Gardens, leaning over Rea Carlisle’s devastated skull, when a constable had called from below, ‘Ma’am, DS Calvin’s been trying to reach you.’

‘My phone’s off,’ she had replied. ‘I’ll call him back.’

‘He says it’s urgent, ma’am.’

So she had left the body and returned to the station.

‘Maybe we could have a quick chat before you do,’ Hewitt said.

‘What about, exactly?’

Hewitt shrugged. ‘Jack and me go back a long way. Personally and professionally. I can give you some background that might be useful. If you want.’

She looked him up and down. He wore a charcoal-coloured suit, well tailored, better than most of his colleagues dressed in. And French cuffs, tasteful links binding them.

Flanagan made a dozen judgements before she opened her office door and said, ‘After you, Inspector.’

As she followed him inside, he said, ‘Call me Dan.’

He offered his hand once more. She dumped the files and jacket on her desk, shook his hand before gesturing towards the seat. His fingers were smooth and cool, like silken worms. Her skin itched where they had touched and she had to force herself not to reach for the bottle of hand sanitiser in the drawer.

Flanagan went to her own chair and said, ‘So what do you want to tell me?’

‘Jack was mixed up with the woman who died last night,’ Hewitt said, crossing his legs. The crease of his trouser ran sharply along his thigh, over his knee, down to the hem. A watch that looked like an Oris from her side of the desk.

She wondered if Hewitt could really afford such details, or if he liked to live better than a DCI’s income should allow. Even if he was C3, the force within a force.

Stop it, she thought. You’re not investigating him.

‘He told my colleague he saw her yesterday afternoon,’ Flanagan said.

‘Is he a suspect?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not ruling anything out. You said he’s a friend of yours.’

‘Yes. Well, he used to be, anyway.’

‘Not any more? What happened?’

‘This is off the record, yes?’

‘Of course,’ Flanagan said. ‘What ended your friendship with him?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ Hewitt said. ‘We just drifted apart. Especially these last few years. We still speak the odd time, but he’s not the same Jack I went to Garnerville with.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘He used to be a good guy. You know, even when this was the Royal Ulster Constabulary, we were like any other police force. We had good and bad, and Jack was more good than bad. He got a commendation for bravery one time. He and his patrol were ambushed by republicans in the city centre. He took a bullet to the shoulder and still saved the life of one of his colleagues. But he wasn’t the same after that. I mean, he always had an eye for the girls, he chased every bit of skirt he saw – pardon the expression – but he got a bit more desperate as he got older. He had to work harder at it, and I think it made him bitter.’

‘Towards women?’ Flanagan asked.

‘The world in general, but women in particular. The way he used to talk, sometimes. The way he saw women. I found it . . . well . . . distasteful. But he seemed to settle down for a while, with that Marie McKenna, the politician’s niece. Then she got pregnant, and he cleared out. I thought that was rotten, and I told him so. He went downhill after that. Got nastier, that bitter streak coming out in him. That’s when I started hearing about the backhanders.’

‘Bribes?’

‘Small things, at first. Favours, more than anything. He got pally with some dodgy boys running prostitutes. They’d get wind of any raids that were coming, he’d get freebies from the girls. So my sources said, anyway.’

‘What kind of sources?’

Hewitt smiled. ‘The kind of sources that aren’t discussed outside Intelligence Branch.’

‘Fair enough,’ Flanagan said. ‘Did money ever change hands?’

‘Occasionally,’ Hewitt said. ‘But it was more like payment in kind, if you know what I mean?’

‘What about drug use?’ she asked.

Hewitt shifted in his seat.

Flanagan waited.

Hewitt shrugged and said, ‘It’s only a whisper.’

‘Go on.’

A high whine as he exhaled through his nose, a crease in his brow. ‘It’s just something I heard, a friend of a friend of an informer.’

Impatience made Flanagan tap her pen on the desktop. Hewitt looked at it, then back at her.

‘He’s never bothered with narcotics as far as I know, but since the incident last year, he’s been taking prescription painkillers. But without the prescription. It’s hardly surprising. We both know cops who’ve suffered post-traumatic stress. We both know what it does to them.’

‘Where does he get the painkillers from?’

‘I don’t know. Presumably one of the pimps he deals with. Like I said, it’s second-hand information.’

Flanagan knew it was the first outright lie Hewitt had told since he entered her office. He tried to cover his deception by a smooth manner he probably thought of as charm, but she saw through it like looking through dirty glass. Everything else he’d told her had been the truth, or at least Hewitt’s version of it. He’d skewed it all, made sure only to tell her what he wanted her to know. His sole fabrication had been that he didn’t know Lennon’s source for the painkillers. But Flanagan had learned long ago never to expect a straight answer from an Intelligence Branch officer when it came to their sources. Or any other topic, for that matter.

‘I’ve one more question for you,’ she said. ‘And I want you to think carefully before you answer it.’

‘Fire away,’ Hewitt said.

Flanagan locked her eyes on his. ‘Do you believe DI Jack Lennon had it in him to kill Rea Carlisle?’

Hewitt held her gaze. Swallowed. Wetted his lips.

‘Yes I do,’ he said.

Flanagan sat back in her chair, watching him. His eyes flicked down to her chest and back again. Then down once more, lingering there.

She felt heat rising on the skin of her neck.

Hewitt shifted in his seat. Touched a finger to his cheek, scratching some itch Flanagan knew to be a phantom. Showing his discomfort. He looked back up at her.

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said.

Flanagan glanced down, saw the red bloom on her blouse where Dr Prunty had taped the cotton wool that morning.

‘Thank you for coming by,’ she said. ‘It’s been a help.’

‘Not at all,’ Hewitt said. ‘If you need any material on Jack, who he associates with, that sort of thing, just let me know.’

He stood and left her there, her face burning red.

HOURS HAD PASSED
before DCI Serena Flanagan arrived. Lennon had drunk three coffees, eaten two rounds of toast and a bar of chocolate, and wished desperately for a cigarette, even though he didn’t smoke. Not when he was sober, anyway. He thought about leaving. He wasn’t under arrest, they couldn’t hold him here. But still, something told him to stay put, to endure.

An ache had settled into his lower back, echoed by the joints of his shoulders and hips, and a throbbing inside his skull. He’d left the painkillers in his car. His tongue dried at the idea of swallowing codeine and the comfort that would seep through his body.