Lying in Wait (6 page)

I had already disappointed him by not being athletic and not loving rugby or golf. One time, he had forced me to endure eighteen holes of golf in his company. I never knew how to have a conversation with him, and I couldn’t hit the ball more than three yards. On that particular trip, I embarrassed him in front of his friend. It was a ‘father and sons’ outing, suggested no doubt by his friend, who belonged to a posher golf club than Dad’s one. The other son was a good
bit younger than me, but I disgraced myself by fainting at the fourth tee and had to be rescued by a golf buggy and carted back to the clubhouse. When Bloody Paddy Carey had done his worst, Dad had to cancel his golf membership, claiming that he just didn’t have the time. Every cloud.

But I had always managed to maintain top grades. He didn’t need another reason to go ballistic. And I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to control my own reaction if he did. Mum would try to play it down and point out that Bs and Cs were still very good.

I handed the blue envelope over to my dad on the first day of the holidays, thinking I just needed to get it over and done with. He opened it absent-mindedly as I waited nervously, but as he scanned through it, he didn’t seem angry at all. ‘Where are all the As? You’ve slipped,’ he said.

Mum picked it up then. ‘Oh God, Laurence!’ she said after she’d read the whole thing. ‘It’s not a disaster, darling, but what has happened to you?’ And before I could answer, she said, ‘It’s that girl. She’s a distraction. Not a tap of work is being done while she’s around.’

‘Her name is Helen,’ I muttered.

‘Don’t talk back to your mother,’ snarled the suspected murderer/kidnapper, but he left the room then and didn’t mention it again.

Mum gave me a lecture: she was going to keep a closer eye on me, she said, and I could catch up on the lost As over the Christmas holidays. ‘Of course, it’s all my fault, I could tell that girl was trouble the moment I heard about her. I should have put a stop to it then.’

I managed to ring Helen and tried to tell her that we needed to cool things down a bit.

‘Fuck that,’ she said, ‘are you a man or a mouse?’

I didn’t answer the question.

Mum worried as Dad began to look old and ill. I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t settle. Mum said we should just be gentle around him and try not to make any demands on him. She confided there were serious financial worries that he refused to discuss with her. I played along with her concerns, insisting that my too-small blazer was fine and there was no point in getting a new one for the last five months of school. She admitted we simply couldn’t afford to buy what we needed.

I had never known my dad to be beaten by stress before. Stress and depression were my mother’s weaknesses. As he became more frail, I realized that I was possibly the only person who knew the real reason for his decline.

I turned eighteen on Christmas Day. Helen and I exchanged gifts the evening before, when she called to Avalon. Helen said I was a cheap date because she’d only had to get me one combined birthday/Christmas gift. It was a
Star Wars
T-shirt (we’d seen
The Empire Strikes Back
by then), but I didn’t dare try it on in front of her. I told her it would be great for the summer. As I suspected, it was too small. I got her a pair of earrings made of pieces of coloured glass. She said they were lovely and that she’d been meaning to get her ears pierced anyway.

I was angling with Helen to try sex again, but she said I’d put her off. My hand was red from being slapped away. That is my abiding memory of that Christmas Eve – me wheedling, her slapping.

The big day started out as the usual family affair. We ate in the dining room instead of the kitchen. The table was set with linen and crystal, and Dad, for the first time since, well, since
that
time, made an effort to be on good form. He faked jollity and merriment and read the same lame jokes we’d
heard every year from the Christmas crackers. He complimented the food, and although I could see how much it irked him, he ignored the amount I heaped on to my plate. I decided to take advantage of the birthday/Christmas Day amnesty and ate an entire box of Quality Street. Neither of them commented.

We opened our presents. Among other things, I got a Rod Stewart
Greatest Hits
album that I really wanted. I had bought my mother a charm for her bracelet. I got her one every year. It was a tiny figurine of a ballet dancer. Mum had done ballet when she was young and could have studied it in London as a teenager but refused because she was scared of being homesick. Mum never went on holidays. She couldn’t bear to be away from Avalon for more than a day. As a twelve-year-old child, she had been painted doing exercises at the barre in the manner of Degas, and the large rosewood-framed canvas hung over the mantelpiece. She still practised her steps and did stretching exercises for hours every morning in front of the mirror in the dance room upstairs. She loved her new charm, but then I knew she would. I gave Dad a
Rumpole of the Bailey
book. He liked the television series, liked to complain how unrealistic it was, but would never miss it.

‘Thank you, son, very thoughtful.’ He seemed to be genuinely moved, and I began to feel a glimmer of
something
for him, and to wonder if all would be well. And then I thought of Christmas Day in Annie Doyle’s house, and her mum and dad and sister staring at the empty space at their Christmas table. I knew they were not having a good day.

Dad wanted to make a fuss about the fact that I was eighteen, and gave a nice speech about how I was a man now and that soon I’d be out in the world, in charge of my own decisions, and that he knew I would make them proud. Mum tutted at the bit about me being out in the world, but poured
me a small glass of wine, my first legitimate glass of alcohol, and then presented me with an extra gift, something specifically from her, she said. It looked like a jewellery box, but when I opened its hinged lid there was a solid gold razor inside, nestled in a velvet mould. It was a family heirloom and had been her father’s.

I knew this was momentous for her and that she wanted it to be so for me, but my father couldn’t help himself.

‘For God’s sake, Lydia, that’s ridiculous! Laurence doesn’t even shave yet,’ he said with a sneer. ‘He’s a late developer, aren’t you, boy?’

It was true that I did not yet need a razor, but I was fully developed in every other way and was sorely tempted to tell him I’d already had sex. Mum was hastily trying to calm things down. Her refereeing skills were second to none. ‘Maybe he doesn’t need it quite yet, but he soon will!’ she said brightly, putting her hand firmly on my father’s arm.

My father squirmed for a moment and said rattily, ‘Yes, yes, of course he will.’ He gave me a manly playful punch on the shoulder. I tried not to wince, not from the pain but from the insincerity of it.

‘Cheers! Happy birthday!’ said my mum as she raised her glass, and we all clinked glasses.

I met my father’s eyes and I could see that he was trying to look at me in a genuine way just for that briefest moment, trying to see who I was. I held his gaze. A moment of understanding passed between us in which I could see some decency and he could see his son beneath the layers of flesh. The moment faded though, when the phone rang. Mum went out to answer it.

‘It’s that girl!’ she called from the hallway. I could hear the heavy sigh in her voice.

Dad threw his eyes to heaven in exasperation. ‘It’s
Christmas
Day
!’ As if there was a law that you couldn’t use the phone on Christmas Day.

‘It’s my birthday,’ I reminded him. He remembered and smiled indulgently at me. I felt again the knot of anxiety in my stomach. He looked so damn benign, but I knew the truth.

The phone call from Helen was brief.

‘Happy birthday! And Christmas! What did you get?’

I listed the gifts I’d received.

‘Is that all? I thought you would get more than that.’ Helen thought that a big house equalled rich equalled extravagant. It is rarely the case.

I could hear the yelling of her brothers and loud pop music in the background.

‘Mum looped the fucking loop and got Jay and Stevo a drum kit. The mad bitch.’ Jay and Stevo were six and eight years old respectively. Then all I could hear was a deafening clash of cymbals, and Helen and two other voices roaring, ‘Shut up!’

My mother put her head around the cloakroom door and gave me her ‘Get off the phone’ look. Conversation was more or less impossible at Helen’s end anyway because of the cacophony, so I bade her farewell. As I approached the kitchen, I could hear the clatter of them clearing up in there. Dad said, ‘What kind of moron rings on Christmas Day?’

‘Andrew, I don’t like her any more than you do, but for God’s sake can you just try and be nice to him for one day? It’s his birthday!’

‘What does she even see in him? The size of him. She’s no oil painting but –’

‘He is your son! Can’t you please –’

I coughed. I wanted them to know that I’d heard them. They both looked uncomfortable, and my father at least had
the grace to be embarrassed. I had never heard him express his opinion about me so blatantly before. By now I felt hot and restless. I was all too aware of this scornful, sour, superior presence standing at the kitchen sink, looking out of the window, pretending Annie Doyle didn’t exist and wishing that I didn’t either. I hated him. I wished
he
were dead.

After
Da had reported Annie’s disappearance to the guards, we expected news within a day or two, but it didn’t happen quite like that. We went to the station that Friday night, the 21st of November. Detective Mooney seemed to take our concerns seriously. We gave him descriptions of the clothes missing from her wardrobe.

‘Any distinguishing features?’ he said. I pointed to her mouth in the photograph. ‘And she wears an identity bracelet that she never takes off.’

‘So her name is on the bracelet?’

‘No, it just says “Marnie”.’

‘Is this Marnie a friend?’

Da glared at me. ‘Never mind about that. Marnie is someone she used to know. The name isn’t important.’

I know that the next day they interviewed the girls who lived in the house with Annie. I went to Clarks’s Art Supplies to ask if my sister had bought a painting set on the previous Saturday. I showed the girl behind the counter a photo of our Annie. Annie was pretty drunk in the photo, but it was the best one we had. It had been taken the year before at my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party. In all the other photos she had her hand over her mouth, obscuring her most notable feature. The guards had rejected all of those, but I knew Annie would be furious that we were putting out the photo she had tried to tear up. ‘I look like a bleedin’ mutant!’ she had said.

The girl in the art supplies place remembered Annie
coming in weeks previously, examining the painting set and talking about coming back to buy it. She said she had suggested that Annie could leave a deposit, but she had said she would be back with the full price. It wasn’t surprising that Annie had never turned up. I was annoyed with myself for even hoping that she might have.

I wondered if she had travelled to London for an abortion. If she’d been pregnant, there is no way she would have risked being sent back to St Joseph’s. But if she’d gone to have an abortion, she would have packed a bag, and she would certainly have been home by now. In desperation, I spent a morning on the phone to all the hospitals in Dublin. None of them had any record of her or of anyone matching her description. Detective Mooney told me he had covered the same ground with the same results.

Ma spent all her time in the church, praying for Annie’s return, but Dessie and me took time off work to go out looking for her. We talked to the locals in the Viking. I thought they’d be more likely to talk to me than to Ma. We knew some of them to see. They all knew Annie, smiled when talking about her. ‘She’s some demon for the Jameson’s,’ said the barman, who, no doubt, had never refused her cash. They had wondered where she’d been. I asked if she’d ever been there with a boyfriend. One of her ‘friends’ looked a bit cagey then. ‘A few,’ she said, and Dessie got that mortified look and left the pub.

We went to her boss at the cleaning agency too. The guards had already talked to him by the time we got there, and he refused to talk to us, saying he’d already told the guards all he knew. ‘She’s a pain in the arse,’ was all he said. ‘I was going to fire her anyway.’

Three days after we had reported Annie missing, the guards got in touch with the landlord right before he was
about to clean out her flat. He was furious apparently and ranted about lost rent. They searched it from top to bottom. And I think that’s when they began to take a different kind of interest in Annie.

On Wednesday the 26th of November, Detective Sergeant O’Toole rang and asked us to go to the station, Ma, Da and me. We all exhaled with relief. We convinced ourselves they’d found her.

At the station, Detective Mooney brought us into a small windowless room. There were only two chairs in it, and somebody went to get three more so that Da and I could sit down too. They wanted us all to be sitting down before anything was said. Ma got nervous then, clutching her rosary beads. ‘What’s all the drama for? Can you not just tell us where she is?’

Detective Sergeant O’Toole had been the person we’d been in touch with over the phone in the last few days, but none of us had met him. He was mid-thirties, a stocky build, but he had a shaving cut on his chin and one just under his left ear. I noticed these small things to distract myself from what I now knew was going to be bad news. I realized that if there had been good news about Annie, we would have been told over the phone. Mooney sat beside Detective Sergeant O’Toole on one side of the table and the three of us sat on the other. The table was old and battered, the size of a teacher’s desk. It looked like chunks had been carved out of it with penknives, and it had been graffitied with doodles of topless women and scrawls of ‘fuck the pigs’ and suchlike in pens and markers.

The detective had a file open in front of him. I couldn’t see what had been written down, but I could see the photo of Annie. We had put it up everywhere we could – on lamp posts and in shops, pubs and church porches.

Detective Sergeant O’Toole introduced himself as Declan and asked our first names. He looked me over a bit too long in a way that made me slightly uncomfortable.

‘Did you see me on the television last night? We’re taking this very seriously.’

Ma had seen him interviewed, and treated him like a famous person. Me and Da had missed it because we’d been out looking for Annie.

‘Well now, to be honest I thought we’d get a better response, but I must say at the outset that we have not found Annie.’ A sob escaped from Ma. The tension was driving us all crazy. He ignored her distress and continued: ‘But we have made a few discoveries that I’m not sure you are aware of.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Did you know that your sister is a heroin user?’

‘She isn’t. I mean, she likes a drink but she wouldn’t go near drugs.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Da.

‘When we searched her flat, we found certain items under the mattress that lead us to believe that she is a regular user.’

‘Like what?’ asked Ma.

‘Syringes, foil wraps, a ligature.’

I was shocked. I knew about heroin addicts. You’d see them sometimes around our neighbourhood. They were all hopeless cases, living on the streets, begging for their next fix. I’d seen them with my own eyes. Annie wasn’t one of them. Ma said nothing but cried quietly.

‘She’s not like that,’ said Da, ‘she can be trouble all right, but she’s too smart for drugs.’

‘Gerry,’ said O’Toole, ignoring my ma’s distress, and I didn’t like the condescending way he said it, ‘did you know that Annie has been caught shoplifting three times in the last year? She’s been up in court. The last time, the judge said
he’d lock her up if she came before him again. She is not living a good life.’

Da went quiet then, but I was shocked and furious. ‘Why are you saying that? Annie’s not a thief! And she wouldn’t have the money for drugs. It’s not true, and even if it was, where is she? Have you done anything about finding her?’

Mooney looked towards the ceiling, in embarrassment I think, while O’Toole continued.

‘She got the money from items she stole and then sold on to a third party … and’ – he coughed, but it was a fake exaggerated cough – ‘from other sources.’

He reached out, put his hands flat on the table and addressed himself to Ma. ‘Pauline, we all have to be calm now. I admit that we don’t know where she is, but it seems that she had regular gentlemen … clients … over the last few months, and they might also have paid for her habit.’

It took a few moments for the impact of what he was saying to sink in. Ma was still bewildered, but Da leaped up, sending his chair crashing backwards.

‘Are you saying my Annie is a prossie? Is that what you’re saying? Because I’ll break your face if that’s what you’re after hinting.’

I pulled Da by the sleeve as O’Toole jumped out of his chair and pushed Mooney in front of him. Mooney moved behind Da, put a calming arm on his shoulder and spoke quietly. ‘Now, sir, we’re just dealing with the facts here to help us find your daughter.’ Da was breathing heavily, clenching his fists together, then pulling at his hair.

‘Da, please stop! Sit down.’

He slumped back into his chair. O’Toole nodded at Mooney, who stood sentry beside Da. O’Toole leaned forward and spoke quietly.

‘I understand that it’s upsetting for you to hear this, but we looked into Annie’s background. We know that she spent two years in St Joseph’s. You sent her there yourself, Gerry.’

Da put his hands over his face.

‘Now, I have to ask you a question and I want you to think hard before you answer it. Do you think there is a possibility that Annie might have taken her own life?’

I didn’t have to think hard at all. ‘No, absolutely not.’ It had already crossed my mind, but Annie was optimistic on the last Thursday I’d seen her. She was upbeat and hopeful of getting money from somewhere. She had left no note. There was no body. Annie would not have done that to us. Despite the constant arguing with our da, there had always been some sort of a bond between them. She wouldn’t even have done it to him. Ma and Da readily agreed with me.

‘Not our Annie,’ Ma said.

‘Well, we can never rule it out and I’m happy to proceed with the investigation. However, as you might guess, the news coverage so far hasn’t proved very … fruitful. But I know a few people in the press who might be interested in the human angle of the story. Would you be prepared to talk to them this afternoon, if I was able to get them down here to the station?’ O’Toole was excited by this, I could tell.

‘Just me?’ said Da.

‘All of you.’ He nodded towards me. ‘Sure, it’s no harm to put a pretty face forward.’ He winked at me. I was disgusted.

‘And tell them that my Annie is a drug addict and a prostitute?’

‘Well, of course, there would be no need to reveal any of those more … troubling details. I’m just talking about a straightforward appeal for your daughter to come home. We have no evidence that any harm has come to her, but she may
be in the company of some, shall we say, unsavoury types. It would just be you three talking to a few reporters, no big deal. None of the other … information would be released to them.’

Detective Mooney looked at Da gravely. ‘I think it’s your best chance of finding her, Gerry.’

We argued about it. Ma wanted to do it, but Da was reluctant. They had a massive row in front of O’Toole, and I was caught in the middle.

‘You were always ashamed of her,’ Ma said to Da.

‘Can you blame me, Pauline? I’m hardly going to be boasting about my junkie whore daughter, am I?’

‘So you’d be happy if she was dead in an alley somewhere, would you? You’d be happy if you never saw her again?’

‘No! I’m not saying that. I just worry about what happens next time she goes off on a bender. I’m worried sick, if you must know.’

‘She’s your flesh and blood. We have to find her.’

‘I agree with Ma. What if she’s in some bad situation? She’s not on a bender. If the people she’s with know that the guards are looking for her, they might send her home.’

‘We don’t even know that she hasn’t gone off somewhere –’

‘We
do
know, Da. All her stuff was still there. She wouldn’t have taken off and left her stuff behind.’

We went back to the garda station in the afternoon. Dessie came with us, though he sat at the back of the room. I’d told him about the drugs and prostitution. He was utterly shocked. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, ‘I never knew she was
that
bad.’ He shook hands firmly with my dad, as if it were a funeral. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

Da just glared at him. Da was still unenthusiastic about meeting the reporters, and Ma was really nervous. O’Toole said, ‘Don’t worry if you break down and cry when you’re
talking about Annie,’ and I thought that was a strange thing to say because he was almost hinting that we
should
cry. Detective Mooney told us, ‘Just be honest, tell Annie that you want her to come home.’ Da said, ‘I
do
want her to come home,’ as if the guard was challenging him. ‘It’s OK, Da,’ I said.

We were brought into a bigger room with a big conference table and sat on one side of it with O’Toole. I couldn’t call him Declan. I noticed that he had had his hair cut since that morning. I guessed he didn’t give a damn about Annie and just wanted to be in the papers. He’d been so pleased with himself about being on the telly. When a photographer requested our photo, O’Toole jumped up and stood between us with his arms out, like Jesus in a holy picture of the Last Supper. A few men scribbled into jotters and clicked their cameras as Ma and Da talked about Annie. O’Toole looked meaningfully at me, urging me to say something, but I just sat with my head down and said nothing. I didn’t want to cry in front of strangers.

I had information too that I had not shared with my parents; it would have hurt them too much. Earlier, before the press conference, O’Toole had taken me aside. He put his arm around my shoulder in a way that was supposed to be comforting, but I felt like gagging from the smell of his overpowering aftershave.

‘Karen,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything I can do, you know? I hate to see you suffering, like.’

‘Don’t you have any leads on where she went? Any clue as to what might have happened to her?’

‘Afraid not, but we’ve tracked down her pimp. He thinks she was seeing fellas on her own for the last few months. She wasn’t on the streets like she’d been before, but she seemed to have money for heroin. Sometimes, you know, a
girl is better off with a pimp because he’ll offer her some protection.’

‘And did you arrest him?’

O’Toole seemed perplexed. ‘For what?’

‘For being a pimp! Isn’t it illegal?’

He actually laughed at me. ‘Now, don’t be getting upset, a pretty girl like you. Pimps are useful to us in other ways.’

I was livid. ‘I bet they are.’

He released me from his grip then. ‘I’m on your side, you know. I wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, if I were you.’

I was shocked by how threatening he was. I needed to play along with him or he wasn’t going to help us.

‘I’m sorry, it’s just that … I’m worried … we’re close, me and Annie.’

‘I suppose it hurts that she kept secrets from you.’ He rifled through his desk and pulled up a copybook, like an old school jotter. ‘We found this with the syringes under the mattress. It’s not of any use to us, but maybe you’d like to keep it?’