The Final Silence (8 page)

Without a word, Ellen and Lucy slipped away, heading for the bedroom they shared.

Lennon had a ridiculous urge to laugh. It turned to a cough as he choked it back. ‘Well, I—’

She slapped the worktop with her palm. ‘While I went out to work, you pissed about all day long.’

Lennon spoke louder than he’d intended. ‘I’m not going to—’

‘I am not your mother, Jack. You’re not a child. You’re a grown man, and I wish you’d start acting like one.’

He walked towards the living area. ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’

‘And how many of those pills did you take?’

He grabbed the remote control from the coffee table. ‘I told you, I don’t remember.’

‘You shouldn’t be taking any at all. You don’t even have a prescription for them. Christ knows where you—’

‘I need them for the pain.’

‘Bollocks.’ She spat the word at him. ‘You use them for a crutch. Just like you use me for a crutch.’

He gave no answer as he sat down and flipped through the channels. They did not speak as Susan fetched the girls from their room and served them dinner at the table. Lennon sat and listened to the clank of cutlery on plates. Neither Lucy nor Susan said goodnight to him as they went to bed. Only Ellen embraced him before she left him alone, and he was glad of her touch.

REA SAT ON
the stairs, in the same spot where she had said goodbye to her mother that afternoon. When Ida let herself in, it must have looked as if her daughter hadn’t moved in all that time.

‘Right, what’s wrong?’ she asked as she closed the door behind her. She looked like she’d dressed in a hurry. A breeze made the door sway inward again. Ida tutted and shoved harder. This time, it latched.

‘You said you didn’t really know your brother,’ Rea said.

Ida frowned. ‘That’s right.’

‘Well, what
did
you know about him?’

‘What I told you. More or less.’

‘How did his wife die?’

Ida came to the bottom of the stairs and leaned on the banister. ‘It was awful sad. Turned out she had a wee bit of a drinking problem. She’d had a bellyful of sherry the night she died. She fell down these stairs and cracked her head open.’

Ida looked down at her feet as if realising she stood on the very tiles that had crushed Carol Drew’s skull.

Rea asked, ‘Was there ever a question?’

‘About what?’

‘About how she died. That there might’ve been more to it.’

‘What, you mean, something suspicious?’

‘Yes.’

Ida shook her head. ‘No, no, nothing like that, not at all. Why? What’s going on?’

Rea didn’t answer. Instead, she asked, ‘What about when you were kids? What was he like then?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ida said, lowering herself to sit two steps below Rea. ‘I didn’t really see that much of him. He was only my half-brother, remember. He spent some of the time with an aunt of his, his own father’s sister. She was a hard auld bissum, didn’t have a good word for anybody. She never forgave my mother for marrying again so quick after Raymond’s father died. Raymond lived with us on and off, but him and my father never saw eye to eye. And then there was that bit of trouble with the police.’

Rea leaned forward. ‘The police?’

Ida looked down at her hands, knotted them together, like she’d set free some terrible secret. ‘Well . . . there were a few times, actually.’

‘What for?’

‘The first couple of times, it was silly stuff. Lifting things out of shops. Sweets, cigarettes, anything he could fit in his pocket. Then there was that tramp he gave a beating to. He swore to our mother this tramp had attacked him. He might’ve gone to prison that time, only the case fell through when the tramp wouldn’t talk to the police, and Raymond was only a teenager, so they couldn’t make it stand.

‘My father put him out then, told him he could go back to his aunt’s and never darken our door again. Except she wouldn’t have him either and he wound up living on the streets. After no one had heard from him for a few weeks, my mother made my father take her out in the car looking for him. They found him out by the gasworks living in cardboard boxes.’

‘So they took him back?’ Rea asked.

‘Well, Mummy didn’t give Daddy much choice in the matter. Either Daddy let Raymond come back or she’d go, and take me with her. So he came back, and he was good for a while. That was the closest we ever got to being a family. But then the burglaries started. A square mile around our house, there was one or two break-ins a week. Hardly anything taken, but the drawers would be gone through, all the private things would be pulled out and thrown around the place. Sometimes, whoever broke in would do their business in the beds.’

Rea almost laughed, but choked it back. ‘What, you mean shit in them?’

Ida gave her a hard stare. ‘Language. You’re not too big for a clip round the ear. But yes, that. And other things.’

Rea didn’t want to think what the “other things” might be.

‘Anyway,’ Ida continued, ‘this went on for weeks, maybe a dozen houses were broken into. Then some big fella who worked at the shipyard caught your uncle Raymond climbing over his back wall. He gave Raymond an awful doing. Put him in the hospital. Then, of course, Raymond was off to borstal. It broke Mummy’s heart, and Daddy was finished with him. He was never back in our house again. He joined the merchant navy the week after he turned sixteen.’

They sat quiet and still for a while, Ida worrying at the tissue she’d pulled from her sleeve, Rea searching for a way to tell her mother the awful thing she had discovered. Eventually, there was nothing for it but to take a breath and say it out loud.

‘I got into the back bedroom.’

Ida looked up from her tissue. ‘Oh? How?’

‘I broke in,’ Rea said. ‘I took a crowbar from the garage and forced the door.’

‘Och, Rea, who’s going to fix that? Why didn’t you wait and get the locksmith out again?’

Rea dropped her gaze. ‘I found something in there.’

‘What? For goodness’ sake, will you just tell me what you called me back here for?’

‘I did a search on my phone for her name,’ Rea said. ‘Gwen Headley. She went missing in Manchester in 1992. All they ever found of her was some clothing in an alley behind the house where she shared a flat with another girl. According to the old news reports I dug up, it rained very heavily the night she disappeared, so the police never found anything useful. Just this one scrap of clothing, it didn’t say what it was. A van was seen in the area. They eventually found out its number plates were stolen off a van of the same make and colour, and a plumber’s sign was taken off another van.

‘This girl, Gwen, she was from Wales. She had a music degree, played clarinet. She’d stayed on in Manchester after university and got a job in a post office until she could get her music career going full time. Her parents never found out what happened to her. But
I
know.’

Ida reached up, put a hand on her daughter’s knee. ‘Rea, love, I don’t understand. What’s this girl got to do with us?’

‘It’s all up there, in a book, like a wedding album. Like a scrapbook. He wrote it all down, kept pictures, press cuttings, there’s even a lock of hair and a fingernail.’

Ida stared at her, shaking her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘That girl, Gwen Headley,’ Rea said. ‘Uncle Raymond killed her.’

Ida closed the book and sat back in the chair.

‘I can’t read any more,’ she said. ‘Is it all like that?’

‘I couldn’t read much more of it,’ Rea said. ‘Not in detail. A boy in Leeds, a homeless man in Dublin, a prostitute in Glasgow. And on and on. Some of them have names, some of them don’t. I counted eight altogether. Some of it’s just ranting at nothing. There are pages that make no sense at all. It reads like he was kind of coming and going. Out of his mind on one page, completely lucid the next. It’s as if he’s talking to himself sometimes. But all those people . . .’

Ida stared at some distant point, perhaps a memory of her brother, the stranger that shared her mother.

Rea leaned against the door frame. ‘How do you want to handle it?’

Ida looked up at her with a lost expression on her face. ‘What do you mean, handle it?’

‘I mean, when we call the police. I suppose Dad will want to be careful it doesn’t affect his standing in the party, and—’

‘We can’t call the police,’ Ida said, shaking her head.

‘What are you talking about? We have to call them.’

‘No,’ Ida said. ‘Not without talking to your father. It could ruin him. He’d never hang on to his seat in Stormont, let alone get the Westminster candidacy. They’d drop him like a stone.’

‘Why?’ Rea took a step into the room. ‘It’s not his fault. He’s not even really related to Raymond. They can’t hold this against him.’

‘They can and they will. Doesn’t matter that he hadn’t seen Raymond in years, he barely spoke two words to him since Carol died, it doesn’t matter at all. He’ll be finished if this gets out.’

Rea approached the table.

‘But what about Gwen’s parents? They never knew what happened to her. They never got to bury her. There, at the end of that section, he says what he did with her body. How can we not let them bury their daughter?’

Ida’s voice became shrill and quivery. ‘What good will that do them? It’ll not bring her back, will it? Do you really want them to know what this person did to their wee girl? Do you even know if they’re alive?’

‘This person,’ Rea echoed. ‘You mean Raymond. Your brother.’

‘My half-brother,’ Ida said. ‘He was no more a brother to me than the man in the moon.’

‘Then why not report it?’

‘Because we can’t. Your father won’t allow it.’

‘I really don’t think it’s up to him.’ Rea leaned on the table, closer to the book than she cared to be. ‘I asked you how to go about it to make this easier on the two of you. But I can’t keep this secret. It’s not just that girl’s parents who are suffering. Look through those pages. How many more of them are there? Women and men, names, places, the things he kept.’

Ida stood up and moved away from the table. ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I need to call your father.’

She took the mobile phone from her handbag, the one Rea had bought her for Christmas, and fumbled at the buttons until she found the number she needed. She closed her eyes as she held it to her ear and waited.

‘Hello? I know . . . I know you’re busy, but . . . Stop . . . Stop and bloody listen.’

Ida glanced at Rea, blushing at the vulgarity that had passed her lips.

‘It’s important. You have to come to Raymond’s house straight away . . . No . . . No, not later. Right now . . . You’ll see when you get here . . . You’ll see . . . Tell them whatever you like, just get here . . . All right . . . Don’t be long.’

She hung up.

Rea said, ‘He’ll say the same as you, won’t he? Not to call the police.’

Ida nodded. ‘You know he will.’

Rea had an answer for that hidden in her pocket.

Graham Carlisle paced the room, hands clasped at the small of his back. He had worn one of his best suits to the committee meeting, charcoal grey with a pale pinstripe, a well-pressed shirt with French cuffs and a stiff collar. Rea pictured her mother ironing it that morning, feeling like the great woman behind the great man.

He’d kept in decent shape for a man his age – even a reasonable amount of hair remained on his head – and Rea vaguely remembered that his hard features had once been handsome. Graham had been a lawyer specialising in conveyancing for most of his career. He’d come from as rough a background as Belfast could offer, but he’d clawed his way to a grammar school and university education, unusual for a boy with his upbringing when such opportunities were the preserve of the middle classes.

His journey into politics began at the time when Rea moved from primary to grammar school. Somehow, Rea had sensed that his standing for election to Belfast City Council had been dependent on her passing her Eleven-Plus exams and getting into the right school. She often told herself that was a foolish idea, but she remembered the morning the results arrived in the post bringing to a climax the months of crushing pressure and tension, the after-school sessions with private maths and English tutors, one mock test after another.

When her mother opened the envelope she had sat quiet for a few moments, then burst into tears. Rea had stood there watching, waiting, an eleven-year-old child in pyjamas, the future course of her life having been decided by the piece of A4 paper in her mother’s hands. She remembered needing the toilet badly, afraid she might not be able to hold it but terrified of walking away before her mother revealed the result. The tears meant she’d failed, surely. She felt heat in her own eyes, her lip beginning to tremble. There was nothing worse in the world than to fail.

The first fat, hot drop of salt water had rolled down her cheek when her mother said, ‘You got an A, love. You passed.’

Rea’s tears flowed freely then, but good tears, tears of relief. Ida came over and embraced her. Yet Rea could not stop crying.

Graham had come in from the other room where he had been hiding until he knew it was good news. He patted Rea’s head and took a twenty-pound note from his wallet. Rea accepted it, thanked him, understanding this was as much of himself as he would give.

The following Monday, her father started making calls to his friends and colleagues in the party. He got the nomination for the next council election and comfortably won his seat.

For twenty-three years, Rea had told herself the timing was a coincidence, though she never quite believed it in her heart.

Now the Assembly at Stormont; next, Westminster.

Graham Carlisle had been a man of liberal views, but Rea had watched him turn into one of the grey men of unionism, moulded by the party, becoming more and more conservative as he progressed through the ranks. He had allowed his own beliefs to wither under the shadow of his ambition, no longer a man of principle but a company man, toeing the line set down by his superiors.

When a party leader had expressed the most archaic homophobic views on a late night BBC news panel, her father had been among the first to defend him the following morning. He trotted out the party policy on gay marriage, said it was against the moral beliefs of the majority of Northern Ireland’s citizens. Rea had watched Graham on the lunchtime news, truly ashamed of her father for the first time in her life. It gave Rea an ache in her breast to see him turning so stony and cold that she barely remembered the man who had held her close as an infant.