Can Anybody Help Me? Page 3

  It had all seemed a little mad, a move to a strange country when she was weeks away from giving birth. Before meeting Gerry, Yvonne had known nothing about Ireland, apart from vague memories of nice scenery and burning houses gleaned from a Tom Cruise movie. But this wasn’t her first time starting a new life. The Situation with her mother, which was how she still thought of it, was now ten years in the past. But it had given her courage, and the ability to adapt to new things. She had moved to London alone at the age of eighteen and had managed. Surely she’d be able to do so again.

  Gerry, of course, had been positive about everything. But that was Gerry all over. Sick of freelancing, he had literally bounced around her tiny flat when telling her about the fantastic job offer, the role he’d been waiting for all his working life. Ireland 24 was a brand-new news channel, and the station felt Eamonn Teevan could be its biggest ratings winner. And Teevan himself had asked for Gerry to come on board. It’d be fantastic, Gerry had said. Couldn’t fail. That was Gerry Mulhern’s way. He always looked on the bright side. He had even managed to look on the bright side on the night – less than four months after they started dating – when Yvonne had burst into tears and informed him that the pregnancy test had shown a second line. She hadn’t known what to expect. Anger, maybe? Shock, certainly. But he had simply thrown his head back and laughed, swung her in the air and told her he’d always wanted a family of his own.

  His mother would be delighted, he had assured her. She’d missed him ever since he moved to London and would be over the moon to hear he was moving back with a grandchild, and a wife …

  He’d giggled then, and clapped his hand over his mouth. Wife! Well, why not? And Yvonne, relieved and terrified, and exhausted and hormonal after two nights spent fretting about the future, had said yes. It was the first spontaneous thing she’d done in ten years.

  She’d been eight months pregnant when they’d put the deposit down on the house, and nearly ten by the time they’d moved in. More worried about her waters breaking on the shiny floorboards than the figure written in black at the end of the loan agreement.

  But Gerry had said they could handle it. And after ten years of living on her own, it was nice, for a change, to have someone else make all the decisions. She hadn’t even supervised the final move from London, just let Gerry and his brother pack up her life in a van and bring it over to the home her husband had furnished and prepared for her. And in fairness to Gerry, his taste was impeccable, the sofas alone taking up as much floor space as her London flat. But despite their size, they were just now in danger of being obscured by a giant pile of clean washing while the beautifully stained floors were covered with last night’s pizza crumbs, accompanied by what she feared was a splotch of baby puke. Yvonne shuddered. She really should be using naptime to clean up. Instead she picked up a newspaper off the floor, flattened it out on the large oak coffee table, positioned the phone tightly under her chin and began to read aloud.

  ‘Listen to this – Gardai are appealing for information following the disappearance of a twenty-six-year-old mother-ofone from south-west Dublin. Miriam Twohy from Ballyawlann had been due to collect her daughter from her parents’ house on Sunday morning last after a night out with friends, but never arrived. Her parents alerted Gardai on Sunday evening. Her daughter Réaltín is being cared for by family …’

  ‘Ya see, Bex? MyBabba’s a single mum; it would be just like her to leave her baby with her parents. Her bloke ran off when she was pregnant, she never sees him. She didn’t get on particularly well with her mum when they were younger, but she really stepped up to the plate when the baby was born …’

  ‘Well, maybe …’

  Rebecca sounded less than interested.

  ‘I mean even if it is her, it’s not like you know her or anything, is it? Okay, it might be her, but it’s just some woman. It’s not like she was a friend.’

  ‘No.’

  Yvonne stared at the picture in the paper again. It was a party shot, probably lifted from a Facebook page. A twenty-something woman with dark shoulder-length hair grinned tipsily into the camera. She held a bottle of beer in one hand and her other arm was outstretched, circling a now cropped-out friend. The flash photography had bleached her face leaving her eye make-up looking dark and garish. She wasn’t the type of woman Yvonne could imagine being friends with in the real world and looked nothing like the image she had had in her mind of MyBabba, with her gentle encouragement and peace-making skills. But that was the whole point of the internet, wasn’t it? You could be whoever you wanted. She herself said stuff on there she’d never dream of saying in real life, stuff about moving to Ireland and the loneliness and the days when even Róisín, the most precious love of her life, seemed like a jailer chaining her to the sofa, surrounded by cups of half drunk, lukewarm tea.

  ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘Sorry, what, love?’

  Becky didn’t bother to disguise her irritation.

  ‘Should I say it to Mike? About the convention? I mean I did all the work on the project, I should be going, it’s just unreal that he’d ask that dickhead in front of me, but at the same time I don’t want to sound like, you know, one of those women …’

  Yvonne closed the newspaper and her eyes, struggling to focus on the complexities of office politics spewing from the other end of the phone. There was a time when that sort of stuff had consumed her. She’d let Becky rant, then they’d meet for a glass of wine or five and by the end of the bottle they’d have sorted out the dickhead and come up with their own plans for world domination, or domination of the marketing conference in Margate, at any rate.

  But now it all seemed alien, compared with her new job of keeping another human being alive from day to day. Still, Becky was her best mate and a real live person who surely deserved a lot more attention than someone she had never actually met.

  ‘Mmm.’

  A few positive noises did the trick and Becky, mollified, began to warm to her theme of double-crossing back-stabbing bastards and the bosses who encouraged them. Yvonne willed herself to concentrate. In the pram on the other side of the giant room Róisín started to cry.

  PRIVATE MESSAGE

  LondonMum – MyBabba

  Hey girl, you okay? Haven’t seen you on the boards for a while. Hope all well LMx

  CHAPTER SIX

  OMG

  BabyBump

  Totally off topic, but did anyone see last night’s Eastenders? OMG I was hiding behind the sofa … I can’t believe he did that!!! And she was in the kitchen the whole time???

  MammyNo1

  I kept DD up late to watch it *LOL* DH was out so it was just us two girls on the sofa , I was screaming at the end!!

  MeredithGrey

  *LOL* totally class episode, the house could have fallen down I wouldn’t have left during it

  Qwerty

  Never watch it *yawns*. I’m more into the Scandinavian drama at the mo

  Gleek

  SSHHHH! I don’t wanna know *hands over ears* I have it sky plussed for tonight, DH is going to the gym, can’t wait!!!!!

  LondonMum

  I love the way you watch Eastenders over here! I was so afraid moving over that no one would know what I was talking about *blushes* it’s my guilty pleasure.

  I had to tell my MIL we weren’t all like that though!

  MammyNo1

  *lol* what, you don’t all act like going ‘up West’ is the biggest treat of your life?

  LondonMum

  *rotfl* no, some of us go up there every day! I used to work Up West It’s not actually that exciting …

  MammyNo1

  Oh LondonMum don’t spoil it for us *LOL*

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The empty feeling in the pit of her stomach was threatening to tip over to nausea. Claire pushed her chair back from the desk and rooted around in her handbag. A cereal bar. Perfect. Thank God she’d grabbed it from the cupboard before leaving the house that morning. She hadn’t had time to ea
t breakfast.

  Unwrapping the bar, she took a bite and chewed, thoughtfully. The second trimester wasn’t much better than the first, really. It felt like the evening after the night before. Not the thrown down on the bed, ‘I’ll barf if I move’ early morning hangover sensation she’d had on and off for the first twelve weeks. More like the ‘I can cope but I don’t wanna’ feeling you got when the initial drink-induced dread had subsided. The stage where you knew you needed food to make you feel better, but the thought of it was pretty unappealing. The stage where sitting in front of the television, picking at a packet of crisps, was as much of an attempt as you wanted to make at living. Which worked well on Sunday evenings, back in the days when the feeling actually was a hangover. Not so useful on a busy Tuesday morning with a pile of paper in the in-tray and unanswered emails glowing accusingly from the computer screen. The guilty verdict in the Clarke case had been a huge boost for everyone in the station. But the celebrations could only last so long, and Miriam Twohy was the main thing on her mind now. It wasn’t unusual for young women to head off for a few days without telling their families. But this woman had left a daughter behind, which was enough of a rarity to make Superintendent Quigley put the case to the top of his priority list.

  She took a sip from the bottle of water on her desk. She needed to drink more of that stuff as well. Pain in the arse, made her want to pee all the time. But it wasn’t about her any more. That’s what the doctor had said when he’d given her the lecture on hydration, the follow up to the rant about blood pressure and stress and women having babies At Your Age. Funny thing was, thirty-nine was a perfectly reasonable, average age to be a Detective Sergeant. But apparently almost elderly when it came to being a first-timer in the maternity ward.

  ‘Am I disturbing you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Detective Garda Philip Flynn bustled over to her. It was an old-fashioned word, bustled, but it described Flynn perfectly. She had no idea how old he was. His round cherubic face, coupled with a permanently world-weary air, made it difficult to pin down, but she had no doubt that he’d end up outranking her at some ridiculously young age. And not a rib of grey hair on his head. Finishing the cereal bar in two quick bites, she threw the wrapper into the bin, pulled herself straighter in the chair and tapped purposefully on the computer keyboard. At more than five months gone, there was no hiding the pregnancy from the lads in the station any longer. But that didn’t mean she was going to let them see her take it easy.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s just we got another call, about Miriam Twohy. Probably a load of rubbish, but you said to pass all the information on …’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Claire beckoned him forward and tried to avoid scowling as he passed his hand over his hair and patted some invisible strands down into his freshly combed side parting. She knew it was irrational, her dislike for Philip Flynn. Always Philip, no one ever called him Phil. She usually liked the younger guards, not long out of Templemore and dying for a bit of action. Falling over themselves to be helpful in case it got them a leg-up down the line. But this fella was different. From Mull-ingar, father a teacher, mother a nurse. A family straight out of one of those articles the newspapers did at budget time, Mary is a nurse and John is a teacher and their tax-free allowances have increased by two per cent … He’d arrived in Collins Street with the confidence of a man twenty years his senior. He didn’t pal around with the younger lads, didn’t do pints after work, didn’t discuss the match on Monday mornings and didn’t seem to take part in any office gossip as far as she could see. He wore his ambition with pride, as a shield that stopped onlookers from guessing what lay underneath.

  And he knew everything. Claire knew from experience that Philip Flynn knew absolutely bloody everything. He didn’t show off his knowledge, he wasn’t that stupid. In fact he was polite to a fault, never first to jump in if a question was asked, preferring to quietly volunteer the information, usually when a superior officer had just entered the room. But he was invariably right, that was the annoying thing. Whether he was talking about the password for the new computers, or the recent flight of fancy by the Minister for Justice that had just been passed by government and was only now trickling its way down to the stooges on the ground who’d actually have to do the heavy lifting. He was the first into the office every morning and the last to leave at night. Claire had a vision of him sleeping in a box, a crime-fighting Dracula, emerging each morning with his hair perfectly in place, ready to do it all over again.

  Wind bubbled inside her and she willed the burp to stay down as she held her hand out for the notes he was carrying. Saw a look of managed concern on his face and decided she would rip his head off if he asked, in that precise way of his, if she was feeling okay. A side parting. Bloody hell. It wasn’t like the rest of his colleagues were big into fashion. They all kept their hair short and neat. But Flynn looked like he still used Brylcream.

  Annoying hair. Hmm, this must be what they meant by pregnancy hormones. She looked up and forced herself to focus.

  ‘So what did the caller say?’

  ‘It’s all here.’

  Flynn patted the paper in front of him. Completely legible handwriting. Of course. Claire felt her lower back twinge and shifted slightly in the chair, the dart of pain making her even more irritable.

  ‘I’ll read them in a minute. Tell me what she said.’

  And Flynn did so, in a detailed but bored way, as if there were something better he could be doing. In fairness to him, it was a pretty mad story. Some woman had called up talking about internet sites and fake names, personal messages and how it was all connected to the missing woman, or might be. It sounded insane. But she could see the scepticism written all over Flynn’s face and decided out of sheer contrariness, not to give him the satisfaction of agreeing.

  ‘I’ll take a look, so.’

  ‘Really?’

  He forgot to hide his surprise and Claire took a certain amount of satisfaction from seeing the mask of managed boredom slip.

  ‘Yeah. Of course. Could be interesting. Have to check all angles, you know? Hand it over.’

  She snapped the papers from his hand and nodded in the direction of the door. Noted with satisfaction that he didn’t like being dismissed in that way. His notes were concise, in fact there was very little to add to what he’d already told her, but she took note of the woman’s name anyway. Yvonne Grant. Twenty-eight. The website was called Netmammy apparently. How incredibly naff. Not the sort of thing she could ever see herself using. Claire hadn’t given much thought to maternity leave, but had vague hopes of getting the house painted, maybe finally finishing the garden she and Matt had been ignoring for years. She wouldn’t be wasting her time on the internet …

  ‘Call on line one.’

  Quigley’s voice on the other end of the phone drove every thought of websites and side partings from her mind. A woman’s body. An apartment block on the outskirts of the city centre, on the very edge of the Collins Street jurisdiction. She stood up, the twinge in her back forgotten.

  ‘On my way.’

  As she walked through the office, she paused at Flynn’s desk, feeling mildly guilty about her earlier sharpness.

  ‘Quigley says you’re to come with me.’

  Leaving his papers stacked neatly on the desk, he followed her out the door.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DH’s shoes?

  FirstTimer

  Girls, I’m a bit worried. Book says baby has to be in with us for the first 6 months so I have the cot set up in the bedroom beside our bed. Only problem is, DH is a builder and every night when he comes home he goes straight upstairs to change his clothes and there’s dust and dirt everywhere. Dirt on his shoes too. Am terrified. Could having all that dust in the room hurt the baby?

  MrsBucket

  Get him to change in the spare room?

  FirstTimer

  Is a two bed apartment, second bedroom is where
all the changing stuff is etc and the baby will be in there for naps etc so I don’t think that helps.

  LondonMum

  It’ll be fine. We all let standards slip a little when babs arrives *blushes* you should see the state of my place! But as long as the place isn’t actually filthy it’ll be fine.

  FarmersWife

  I’ve had this row. DH is a farmer and before we got married he used to tramp mud all over the house, used to drive me mad. We’ve built on a little scullery now and he takes his boots off before he comes into the kitchen. You are dead right to put your foot down before the baby comes!!!!!

  RedWineMine

  I don’t get this. Are you expecting him to actually fling the clothes on top of the baby?

  Don’t you have a laundry basket? Why would the baby be in the bedroom when he comes in from work anyway? Is he like a builder on a nuclear power plant or something? Radioactive dust? Seriously, is there something I’m not getting here??

  CHAPTER NINE

  The feel of a soft pillowcase against her cheek. The little things. Yvonne closed her eyes. Even the very act of shutting her heavy lids was pleasurable. It had been – how long? More than five months since she had last done this. Crept into bed in the middle of the day, on her own, with no one else to worry about. For one hour only, there was no one else in the world who needed her.

  Bliss.

  She stretched out her legs and felt the ache in the small of her back grow, and then ease as she sank further into the mattress. Space. The entire bed, all hers. Her eyelids grew heavier. Sleep would come soon. The day’s events whirled in her brain. She hadn’t wanted to let Róisín go. Hadn’t wanted to rest at all really. But Hannah had insisted, and she was probably right.