Only We Know (9 page)

‘That’s Murphy,’ I said.
‘You know what he’s like. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He loves the
grand gesture.’

‘What he said during Mass – about Mum,
the trials she went through. What do you think he meant by that?’

‘Her illness. Dad’s death. I
dunno.’

‘You don’t suppose he knows, do
you? About what happened back then?’

I felt a tilt of sudden emotion. We never
spoke about it. Never. And I heard again my father’s words in my ears:
Not a
soul. Ever. Do you hear me? You must never tell anyone.

‘No,’ I said, hearing the
sternness in my own voice. ‘He doesn’t know. No one does.’

‘Just you, me and Katie now,’ he
said, in a wistful kind of way.

‘You’re
right,’ he said, conceding something, getting to his feet and picking up his empty
glass. ‘Let’s have another drink. Then you can play us a few tunes – liven
up this party.’ Clasping an arm around my shoulders, he squeezed me to him.
‘Make you sing for your supper, eh, Music Boy?’

The stains to the left of the desk, caught
on the tiny barbs of the tufted carpet. They have been scrubbed, and the thick woven
carpet has been steam-cleaned, but the blood, its density and weight, is still
there.

I bend down to touch the place: as my
fingers brush the carpet fibre I know it’s Luke’s blood and my ears fill
with an unnatural humming.

A shadow falls over me and I almost cry out
in fright.

‘Nick? Are you okay?’ Julia
asks.

‘I’m fine,’ I say,
straightening and leaning against the desk to try to stop the trembling in my legs.

‘It’s weird, isn’t it? The
atmosphere in here,’ she says, hugging herself.

‘A bit, yeah.’

She glances at the empty wall, then bends
down to pick up a cardboard box I hadn’t noticed. Now I see that it contains the
fallen photographs, rent from their frames; the glass that was shattered has been swept
away and discarded. She sifts through them, then picks one out and holds it up.
It’s of Luke and me as kids. ‘I don’t know why he had that hanging in
here,’ I say.

‘He loved you,’ she replies,
referring to Luke in the past tense. ‘There was another I found. Not on the wall,
but here, on the desk. Taken that same summer, but it had Katie in it.’

‘Katie
Walsh?’

‘Yes. I gave it to her.’

I’m so tired, I have difficulty
focusing. I can hardly grasp what she is saying. ‘You gave it to Katie?’

‘She was here yesterday. Or was it the
day before? It’s been so hard to keep track of time since it happened.’

She’s unsettled, worried and upset.
But she gives off something else too, something that suggests she knows more than
she’s letting on. Or am I dreaming? I’m jet-lagged, dazed by being in
Dublin. My surroundings are familiar yet odd; it’s as if I’m remembering
something I dreamed, not something that actually happened.

‘She asked me whether Luke could have
done this.’

This quiet room, the mess all tidied and
cleaned away, retains a shadow of the violence that was done to it. And when I think of
my brother, brought to such a state of anguish that he could inflict it, I feel weak
with sadness and fear.

‘He was having one of his
turns,’ she says softly. ‘You know how he can get … It’s like a shadow
comes over him and all his confidence falls away. The light goes out in his eyes and
he’s somehow vacant.’

‘I know what you mean, but I
haven’t seen him in so long …’

‘Only last month he was out late at a
meeting. Afterwards, he had too much to drink and when he got home he couldn’t get
the key in the lock so he punched through the glass of the front door. I took him to the
hospital and he stayed in for monitoring … He was shaken, Nick.’

‘But had anything happened lately?
Anything that might have triggered it?’

‘I don’t
know,’ she says. ‘He’s been under some pressure with the business, but
–’ She breaks off.

I sense she’s holding something back.
‘What is it?’ I ask gently.

‘It only ever happens when something
from the past comes up … You know what I mean, Nick. That’s the only time
he’s vulnerable.’

I feel the closeness of the room around me,
but say nothing.

‘Nick,’ she says. ‘What
did happen back in Kenya?’

I try to imagine what Luke might or might
not have told her. How he might have hinted at what had happened, alluded to it or even
made some drunken, confused confession. But I don’t know what. How could I?

Julia loses patience. ‘Your wife is
waiting,’ she says, her voice flat and stern. ‘You should go.’

‘It’s not that it’s
bad,’ Reilly says hesitantly. ‘It’s just not really enough. There
isn’t anything new here.’

He seems tired this morning, a little
crumpled, bruised from the editorial meeting he’s just come from. The editor, a
notorious exploder, doesn’t pull any punches and it’s not the first time
Reilly’s been on the receiving end of his verbal abuse. Still, I feel bad that
he’s had to take a bullet on my behalf.

‘Was it awful?’ I ask.

‘Not the worst.’

‘Give it to me straight, Reilly. What
did he say?’

He sighs and leans against my desk.
‘That it’s dull and ponderous and it reads like an obit for the fucking
FT
. That most of it could have been gleaned from Wikipedia.’ His eyes
pass over me, searching for signs of distress.

I raise my eyebrows, lean back in my chair
and exhale. ‘Wow.’

‘Don’t take it to heart,
Katie.’

‘An obit for the
FT
?’

It strikes a note of fear in me. I
hadn’t intended to make it sound as if Luke is dead. For the first time since this
began, the dark sliver of that possibility opens before me.

The post-boy is doing the rounds with his
trolley and stops to drop some letters on my desk, glancing at me and Reilly, then
moving on. My face is burning, the sting of
those words bringing the blood rushing to my cheeks. I lean
forward, pluck a small package from the pile and turn it over in my hands.

‘Could you go back to Julia Yates? See
if she’d open up to you a bit more?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘And you’re sure there’s
nothing else from her interview? Nothing at all?’

Instantly my mind goes to the photograph –
Luke, Nick and I sitting under the African sun, just before it all changed. It’s
been hovering in my consciousness since Julia gave it to me, questions like bees buzzing
at the back of my mind. Why had he kept that picture of us? Leaving it there to be
found, what message had he meant to convey? I can feel Reilly’s eyes on me,
something in me inclining towards his wisdom and intelligence, and I almost tell him.
But the urge passes, overtaken by the dominant voice inside my head that insists I
suppress it, keep a lid on it. Words shoot up painfully from the past:
Don’t
tell anyone.

‘There’s nothing,’ I say,
turning the padded envelope over in my hands.

‘What about your man at the
gates?’

‘I dunno. Security, doorman,
whatever.’

‘He didn’t look very
Downton
Abbey
to me. Anything worth exploring there?’

I don’t try to hide my disgust and he
smiles, saying: ‘I know, I know. You don’t need to say it.’

We’ve had this argument before, about
the risks involved in slipping into murky tabloid territory in a bid to sell newspapers.
It kills me because Reilly has such integrity that I can’t bear to watch his
ideals being compromised.
He’s giving me
the company line now in his softly reasoned tones: circulation, sales figures, blah,
blah, blah. I’m half listening to him as I examine the package in my hands, my
thumb hooking under the flap. The competition of the tabloids, he’s saying, and of
the internet, of every twenty-four-hour rolling news agency. And how else are we
supposed to survive when anyone with a Twitter account can write the news?

‘You may not like it, Katie, but
scandal sells. We can’t afford to sit in our ivory towers.’

But I don’t say anything.

I’m staring hard at the open envelope
in my hands. It’s small enough – no bigger than A4 – manila in colour and padded.
My details have been scrawled in blue marker. English stamps, but I can’t make out
the postmark.

‘What is it?’ Reilly asks, as I
slide the contents out onto the desk.

For a moment, neither of us says anything.
We just look at it. A sparrow, perhaps, or some other small bird. Ornithology is not one
of my strong suits. There is something tender about the way it lies so small and still –
even without touching it, you can sense the silky softness of its feathers, a flare of
orange at its throat. Tender, apart from the angle of its neck – a sharp break, blood on
the feathers from a deep gash that has almost taken the head clean off.

‘Jesus,’ Reilly says.

Still I can’t speak.

He’s on his feet now, shouting for
Janice, and the pitch of his voice betrays his alarm, so that heads pop up from other
desks, interest stirred. His secretary comes running.

‘Get onto the guards,’ he tells
her.

‘Oh, my
God,’ she says, spotting the dead bird, her hand going to her mouth.

‘Reilly, there’s no need for
that,’ I say quietly, still reeling.

‘It was sent to you here at the paper,
Katie. We have to take it seriously.’

‘It’s probably just some
crank.’

‘Course it is, but we still have to
deal with it properly,’ he says. ‘Is there anything else? A note?’

‘No.’

‘And the postmark?’ He picks up
the envelope, squints at it.

‘Smudged.’

‘Brilliant.’ He lets out a sigh,
apprehension coming off him in waves. When he reaches out and I feel the weight of his
hand steady on my shoulder, I swear it’s all I can do not to burst into tears. The
bird lies in front of me, a grim message. But what meaning is it supposed to convey? And
why have I been singled out? Something comes to me then – a sound tunnelling up through
memory: the beating of wings against the bars of a cage. Afternoon sunlight reaching the
veranda, a heavy burden of bougainvillaea blossoms hanging down. On the lawn a revolving
sprinkler sending out jets of water in hoops and swirls. The flutter and twitter of
those sparrows in their cage.

No, I tell myself. It couldn’t be
that. It’s not possible – nobody knows … Mentally I shake myself to shrug off the
memory. Still, the strangeness of the past few days presses down on me. I pull my hands
away from the desk, tuck them under my thighs so that Reilly can’t see them
trembling.

‘Listen, don’t let it get to
you,’ he says quietly. ‘This
happens to everyone once in a while. You’d be amazed at
the kind of cretins out there with time on their hands, fucking idiots with no
imagination who think it’ll be great gas to send something ghoulish to a
journalist, put the frighteners on her.’

‘You’re lucky it’s just a
bird,’ Janice adds. ‘Kieran Fox was sent a turd.’

‘Kieran Fox
is
a turd,’
Reilly says brusquely. Then swiftly, before I have a chance to object, he plucks the
bird from the desk and the queasiness rises to my throat. Without a word, he slots it
into the envelope, taking possession of it. Janice has hurried away, and the hush that
had briefly fallen over the office breaks up, phones ringing, movement entering the
space.

‘You all right?’ Reilly asks me,
and I nod quickly.

His hesitancy is back, but it’s
something different now and I feel my cheeks grow hot again. I try to smile.
‘Really,’ I say. ‘I’m fine.’

I spend the next couple of hours trying to
sex up my article, the words scattering like ash over the screen. A female guard comes.
We sit in the canteen and I answer her questions.

Do you know who might have sent this?
No
.

Have you received similar threatening
messages in the past?
No
.

Do you know of anyone who might have a
grudge against you?

I waver a little over the last one. In my
profession, there are always people whose toes you’ve trodden on. But when she
asks me if there was anything else I could think that might be significant – anything at
all – it’s there again: the
nudge of
memory, that sound in my ears, the flapping of wings. I feel the tightening around my
throat, the pinch of another notch.
No, there’s nothing.

Something about this is making me deeply
uneasy. And it’s not just the dead bird. It began with those photographs of a
drowned girl, like some portent of doom, yet still I didn’t see it coming. But now
Luke is missing and Nick is coming back and I can feel myself being sucked in. Nostalgia
is creeping over me, the strings of the past drawing us together again, tightening
around the three of us.

The guard’s visit leaves me feeling
worse. Instead of reassuring me, her careful questioning seemed more like she was
sticking her fingers into the wound and having a good poke around in it. Afterwards, I
can’t sit still. I grab my things, leave the office, and pretty soon I’m
driving out to the coast. The stale smell of the car rises up around me. It’s no
triumph of modern engineering but I don’t really give a damn, and as I drive down
the quays alongside the widening river, I ignore the detritus of paper coffee cups, old
newspapers and other junk that furnish the back seat, as well as the straining sound the
engine makes every time I change gear. The drive-time radio shows are kicking off and I
flick through the stations, searching for news of Luke, but there’s nothing so I
switch it off.

Before long, I draw the car into a space at
Sandymount Strand, turn off the engine, and silence fills the air around me. I could
have gone to a pub, but I can’t bear the thought of human contact right now – the
noise and distraction. I want to sit alone in my car, watching the night coming on.

I know what has drawn me back here: Luke, of
course. Less than a month ago, now, I had contacted him to arrange
a meeting. He was still riding high on the wave of his
successful
Late Late Show
appearance and I had been assigned to do a feature on
him for the paper. I was reluctant, what with the whole freight of family history
between us, yet something had snagged my interest – an itch I had to scratch.