One Bad Turn Read online

  Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of orange. Claire gripped the window surround and pulled herself up even higher onto her toes. A newspaper-seller was standing at the end of the street, a large stuffed bag hanging from one shoulder. One of the army of men and women who spent their days at busy crossroads, trying to tempt motorists to roll down their windows and buy the evening paper. Claire drove past men and women like him five, six times a day. She never bought anything from them, usually thought of them as a nuisance, if she was honest. She valued her alone time in the car and the last thing she wanted was to have to go scrabbling for change to buy a paper she rarely had time to read. When it rained, she felt mildly sorry for them and wondered if the head-to-toe orange outfits they wore were enough to keep out the wet. But most of the time she didn’t really look at them at all. Now, however, one of their number had become the most important person in her world.

  On the other side of the door, Eileen raised her voice again.

  ‘I lost my child. You can never imagine what that feels like, unless you go through it. So today, you’re going to go through it. Here, have a look at this.’

  There was rustling sound, a pause, then a low moan from the doctor.

  ‘Leah. That’s my Leah. Oh, Jesus. What have you done to her?’

  And a harsh laugh in reply.

  ‘You’ll find out. You’ll find out, Heather, in time. Where’s your husband, by the way? Give me his phone number. I’ll send it on to him. I want him to come here, to see it too.’

  Claire didn’t catch the doctor’s reply, something about being abroad, and not checking messages. But the other woman’s response was crystal clear.

  ‘That’s a pity, Heather. Oh, well. You’ll have to do.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The tablets he had taken weren’t having any discernible effect. Maybe one more for luck. Taking a hand off the steering wheel, Flynn flicked the pill out of its plastic coating, swallowed it dry and chucked the now empty packaging into the back seat of the car. You owe me one, Boyle, he thought sourly. It was bad enough that his morning off had been ruined by the idiot with attitude in his local offy, but now, instead of taking a shower and making his leisurely way to work, he had to scour Dublin for his AWOL colleague. He glanced down at the clock on the dashboard. Half past one – feck’s sake. He should be heading into the station now, giving a statement about the morning’s events. Getting a slagging off the lads to disguise their admiration of how he’d handled the incident. Maybe he could persuade Siobhán to make him a cup of tea, seeing that he was a hero and all. Instead, he was driving around south Dublin, looking for a woman who should know better than to leave her bloody phone turned off for hours.

  Still, though, it would be in his interest to sort this out, and with a minimum of fuss. His boss had sounded really hassled on the phone, and he had a reputation for remembering people who went out of their way to help him. And, more to the point, those who didn’t. Flynn didn’t have the same easy relationship with the super that Boyle did; he envied the way she could shoot the breeze with him, even crack a joke while always staying on the right side of formal. Flynn was never able to do that having-the-crack-but-I-still-respect-you-sir thing and he reckoned doing a favour for the boss wouldn’t do him any harm at all.

  Mind you, Boyle didn’t seem to be in breeze-shooting humour today. Flynn had tried both her home number and her mobile several times since Quigley had called him and both were going to voicemail. The house phone at least offered a couple of rings before an electronic voice informed him that the customer he was calling couldn’t come to the phone right now. The mobile didn’t ring at all, just went straight to Boyle’s gruff message telling him to leave a name and number and that she’d call him back. He had, and she hadn’t. He had even sent her a WhatsApp and taken a sneaky look at her account to see when she had last been online. But she hadn’t checked her messages since the previous day by the look of it, and since then she hadn’t even received his text to her. There was nothing else for it: he’d have to go about things the old-fashioned way. Drive over to the house, have a good look around. Maybe she’d gone to the park, or to a class, one of those baby yoga sessions or something. Flynn allowed himself a quick grin. That was pretty unlikely. For a single gay man with no kids of his own, Flynn considered himself quite the expert on the habits of Irish mothers and their babies, thanks to the time he’d spent online during the first murder case he and Boyle had worked on, two years previously. You could sandwich the words ‘mother and baby’ into pretty much every activity going, he’d found, from jogging to a cinema visit and charge double the price for it. But he didn’t reckon Boyle would be any more comfortable doing such things than he would.

  He took another left, then a right, then swore as he realized that, although he was in the correct part of town, he’d driven down the Lane, not the Avenue, and was facing a dead end. His side throbbed as he put the car into reverse and, wincing, he attempted a three-point turn, completed it in five, then set off back in the direction from which he’d come. Distracted, he didn’t see the urban cowboy in the bull-barred station wagon until he was right on top of him. Without room to pass, both men eyeballed each other until Flynn sighed and reversed back down the narrow road. As the man swept past, Flynn raised one finger off the steering wheel in an ironic echo of the countryman’s salute and wasn’t a bit surprised when it was ignored. Bloody Dubs. Thought they owned the city.

  Flynn took several shallow breaths until the pain in his side had subsided, then pulled out his phone and checked the Google map again. Okay, right, left and then left again. He indicated out and, after a few swift turns, found himself on the same street as Boyle’s small red-brick terraced home.

  There was no front garden or drive-in, just a short path fringed by a patch of green that was more weed than grass and an iron gate that looked like it hadn’t shut properly in thirty years. Flynn parked outside and, moving slowly to avoid aggravating the pain in his side, got out of the car and walked up to the front door. Before knocking, he tried her mobile one final time in case she was, he didn’t know, in the bath or something. God, imagine if she opened the door dressed in a towel! Flynn shivered, and tried to banish the image from his mind. But Boyle’s phone went straight to voicemail as it had been doing all day. Sighing, Flynn rapped on the door and then rang the bell for good measure, but there was no response. He knocked again, then took a step backwards. There was no one in, he could sense it. Call it guard’s intuition or whatever, the house just had an empty vibe to it.

  Feeling more like a stalker by the minute, Flynn took a side step across the patch of grass and peered through the front window. The wooden slatted blinds didn’t afford him much of a view, but he could see enough to confirm that Boyle hadn’t spent her day off catching up on housework. The floor of the sitting room was littered with brightly coloured baby toys, a cloth mat and what looked like a miniature shopping trolley filled with what appeared to be plastic food. But neither the owner of the trolley nor her mother was anywhere to be seen. This was ridiculous. Flynn took a step backwards and trod on the foot of the man standing behind him.

  ‘What do you think—? Oh, my God, Philip! I didn’t recognize you there. I’m sorry if I startled you . . . Are you okay?’

  The expression on Boyle’s husband’s face turned from curiosity to concern as Flynn gripped his side, winded by their collision.

  ‘Yeah, grand,’ he muttered, trying to catch his breath.

  ‘Sorry, Matt, this must look pretty weird.’

  Boyle’s husband raised his eyebrows and didn’t disagree with him. Flynn didn’t know Matt Daly very well. He’d been friendly enough anytime they’d met at work dos and the like, but Daly never seemed particularly interested in his wife’s job and therefore most conversations with her colleagues tended to dry up shortly after the ‘Any news yourself?’ bit. Daly was a quiet fella, Flynn always thought. Not ‘one of t
he lads’, but then again neither was he, so he was hardly going to hold that against him. Friendly enough, most of the time. He didn’t look friendly at all now, but that was hardly surprising.

  Having stopped for a moment to catch his breath, Flynn offered Daly what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

  ‘I was looking for B— sorry, for Claire. Well, the super was looking for her, actually. Just some paperwork he needed. He can’t find it and reckons she has it hidden somewhere. But she seems to have switched her phone off, so . . .’

  ‘Yeah, she has.’

  Daly took a step back and Flynn followed him until they were both standing in the centre of the tiny garden, sharing the space with an awkwardly parked green bin.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get her myself actually, for the past hour. She was supposed to bring the car back half an hour ago. I had a meeting this morning in town, got the Luas in and back just now, but I’m supposed to be heading to Saggart after lunch and I need the car. If I don’t get on the road in the next half-hour I’ll be late.’

  ‘Right.’

  Flynn paused, loyalty to his boss stopping him offering too much sympathy.

  ‘I think she’s on a day off, isn’t she?’

  Daly nodded.

  ‘Yeah. She hadn’t any major plans, I didn’t think so anyway. She had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and she said she might bring Anna to the park afterwards. Nothing major. I was running late when I left so I didn’t really ask. I’ll be rightly screwed now, though, if she doesn’t come home soon.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be along in a minute . . .’ All this domesticity was making Flynn’s head spin, and the idea that you might have to coordinate your movements with someone else’s just to leave the house made him glad he lived alone. But the man in front of him was clearly stressed and he felt the need to come up with some sort of solution.

  ‘Maybe we should walk around to the park, then.’

  Daly shook his head.

  ‘I’ve just come from there. The Luas stops right beside it. No sign of her. Look . . .’

  He pulled a key from his pocket.

  ‘Come on in, why don’t you? She might be back any minute. Excuse the state of the place . . .’

  His voice disappeared as he crunched open the lock and stepped into the small hall, punching numbers into the alarm box beside the door with the fluidity of practice. Flynn waited a second, then walked in after him. The house smelt of baby powder and unwashed dishes, nothing out of the ordinary. It was a lot less tidy than his own place, but he’d seen worse, and only had to step over two pairs of shoes and a plastic-wheeled walker thing as he followed Daly down the hall and into the open-plan kitchen-cum-living room.

  Daly was still talking.

  ‘The buggy’s not here either. I really thought she wouldn’t be long.’

  He walked over to the kitchen counter on the far side of the wall and, when he spoke again, Flynn heard genuine anger in his voice.

  ‘There’s her phone! Christ’s sake, Claire. Great place to leave it.’

  The phone was plugged into a socket on the wall, the lead nestled between a kettle and a blender. Daly walked over to it, pressed the lock screen and frowned.

  ‘Fully charged. That’s mad – she never leaves the house without that thing. She’s never off it – sure you’d know that yourself.’

  Flynn said nothing. He felt strange to be discussing his boss with her husband. It was hard to know, some weeks, which of them spent more time with her, but there was something uncomfortably intrusive about standing in her kitchen discussing her habits with the man who shared her bed. But Daly was right about one thing: Boyle was never off her phone. She claimed she only used it to follow RTÉ and other breaking news sites, but on more than one occasion, when he himself was driving, Flynn had glanced over and caught her checking E! News too, and chuckling to herself over BuzzFeed questionnaires.

  Daly put the phone back on the counter and turned his attention to a giant grey American-style fridge, which had been squeezed into a corner that was really too small for it. He was speaking almost to himself and Flynn had to strain to hear him.

  ‘We write everything down here – since Anna was born. Stuff about childcare and that. Stuff we both need to know. Yeah – here we are!’

  His voice rose in triumph as he pointed to a scribbled note, attached to the fridge by a magnet in the shape of Niagara Falls, a grinning plastic couple plunging over the side in a barrel.

  Flynn moved closer and read over his shoulder.

  Thursday, doctor 12.30.

  ‘Told you! At least we know where she went. Still, though . . .’

  Daly stepped back from the fridge and frowned.

  ‘She should be well back by now. This isn’t like her at all.’

  A note of worry had crept into his voice and Flynn decided it was time to take an active part in the conversation. After all, he’d a vested interest in finding Boyle too. He stuck his hands into his pockets and addressed the other man directly.

  ‘Look, I have the car outside. Do you want to take a spin over to the doctor’s, so? See if we can track her down? She’s probably just forgotten the time, but . . .’

  Daly nodded.

  ‘Yeah, would you mind? She’ll kill me if she thinks I’m checking up on her but I really need that car.’

  ‘Come on, so.’

  Flynn had no proof, but he could swear there was something more to this than Daly was saying. Maybe he and Boyle had had a row, or something. There was more than stale breakfast creating an atmosphere in the kitchen anyway. Maybe Boyle was teaching her husband a lesson. Maybe she’d left her phone at home deliberately and Flynn was being dragged along in the slipstream of the argument. He didn’t want to know the details. The best thing to do was just find the woman, then report back to the super and get on with the rest of his day. Matt Daly unplugged Claire’s phone and shoved it in his pocket and then the two men in her life left the house together determined, for their individual reasons, to track her down.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Eileen, 1996

  Eileen could feel the anniversary approaching, like a physical presence, from midway through August. The rest of the world would be moaning about the bad summer and the cost of returning to school, but in her house, all would be silent. There was no one to welcome home from holiday because no one ever went anywhere. No return to normality to dread, because nothing was normal any more.

  Her father wasn’t angry any more. Just hopeless. He had no future, he told Eileen, nothing to look forward to now that her mother was gone. Some evenings she’d be able to pull him back from the edge, engage him in conversation, interest him in whatever she’d thrown together for dinner or in a programme on TV. But as August moved past and September dawned he’d slip further and further away from her until, when the day itself arrived, he had disappeared entirely.

  ‘A shell of a man’ was how her aunt described him, but Eileen didn’t agree because a shell implied something solid, hard on the outside at least. Her father was a melancholy shadow in a half-life.

  A pathetic person, she found herself thinking once, and hated herself for it.

  ‘You booked the Mass.’

  It was a statement, not a query, directed at her one evening when she came home from work to find him sitting in front of a blank TV screen. She had booked it, of course she had, weeks before. Without the certainty of that ceremony she didn’t think he’d be able to get out of bed on her mother’s anniversary. So, no matter what was going on in her life, or how badly she was needed in work she’d take a day’s leave and walk with him to the church across the road. His suit no longer fitted him: he had put on weight since her mother died, cans of beer having replaced their evening mugs of tea, and as Eileen walked beside her father, slowing her pace to match his, she wondered how she had got there, and if this was how thin
gs were going to be for ever, or at least for as long as her father was still alive and utterly dependent on her.

  Before her mother had fallen ill, Eileen had never seen her father cry. Now tears leaked from him constantly. Watching TV, speaking to his sister on the phone. As soon as his late wife’s name was read out from the altar on the list of the dead the tears would fall. One year Eileen saw a neighbour nudge her husband. There’s Paddy. It must be the wife’s anniversary today. They’d only the one daughter, you know. And the look directed at Eileen herself that said, ‘Wouldn’t you think he’d be over it by now?’

  But he didn’t get over it. And on the seventh anniversary of her mother’s death Eileen realized, quietly but suddenly, that she couldn’t stand it any more. Mass was over and she’d cleared away the uneaten lunch and settled him in front of the TV, the RTÉ Guide open on the arm of the chair. His sister would call over later and make tea, and later still he’d open a bottle of whiskey and the sadness would tip into self-pity. He was fifty-six years old and, Eileen saw, with sudden, desperate clarity, her father could easily go on like that for twenty more years, or thirty, and she soldered to him. She couldn’t bear it. The anniversary this year had fallen on a Friday. She wasn’t due back at work for a couple of days so she packed a bag and simply walked out of the door.

  The first bus leaving the city centre brought her to Galway. When it arrived she climbed straight onto another, headed for the coast. That night she was exhausted enough to sleep soundly in a hostel, the snores of a German tourist in the upper bunk soothing her in a way that the silence of her comfortable room at home never had. The following morning, the German offered her a slice of toast with Nutella, and suddenly Eileen felt like she was on holiday, giddy with freedom and the knowledge that if no one knows you’re supposed to be sad then you don’t have to be. There was a ferry. She bought a ticket. Her movements grew lighter, more graceful, the further from home she got. She felt the sea spray cold against her cheek and laughed into it.