One Bad Turn Page 8

  ‘It’s an awful mistake, I only stepped outside the shop for a second and . . .’

  Eileen bit her lip, looking exactly like the eleven-year-old she had been when they’d first met. Then she gave Heather the slightest wink and turned to the guard, who was now impatiently looking at his watch.

  ‘Lar – can I have a quick word?’

  Without waiting for a response she shook Heather’s hand gently off her arm and pulled the man aside. It was only then that Heather noticed the small, duffel-coated figure standing by her side, huge blue eyes drinking in the scene. He looked around Leah’s age, she thought, and sobbed harder as she thought of her daughter, and the life she had created for her that could, in seconds, be swept away.

  Just as she was about to lose herself in full-throated bawling she noticed the security guard shake his head in a resigned manner. His words floated back to her.

  ‘You’ll have me sacked, you know that?’

  ‘Go on, Lar. I’ll owe you one, yeah?’

  The blush that spread across his face as Eileen planted a kiss on his cheek rendered the store’s central-heating system irrelevant. A moment later Eileen was back at Heather’s side, her small son following close behind.

  ‘That’s sorted. Let’s head out, though, yeah? Before he changes his mind.’

  Within moments Heather found herself out on the street again, only this time with no one standing between her and freedom.

  Shaking, she was unable even to speak to Eileen till they had moved several shops away and she was sure the guard wasn’t going to follow her. Then she leaned, panting, against a shop window and grabbed her school friend’s hand.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  Eileen was pinkly pleased.

  ‘I work there, in Ladieswear. I was just checking the roster. Seriously, Heather, it’s no big deal. I mean, come on, you’re not a shoplifter! Lar is a teddy bear really, although he doesn’t look it. They have to follow protocol but I told him it was all a big mistake. Look, if he ever sees you again, I told him you’re my cousin, okay? I’m pretty sure we used that one before.’

  She smiled, inviting Heather in on the memory.

  ‘I’ve never forgotten how nice you were to me that night, at St Ferdia’s. You probably don’t remember but it meant a lot, what you said. I think . . .’

  Heather tried to return the smile, but the emotion of the day was catching up with her and she felt the familiar tightness in her chest, the wheeze building from the bottom of her lungs.

  ‘I just—’

  The rest of the sentence was trapped in her throat as her airway began to close. Her head thumping, she began to dig around frantically in her handbag.

  Eileen frowned.

  ‘Are you okay? Can I do anything?’

  Shaking her head, Heather extracted the small blue plastic inhaler and sucked on it frantically. Another new addition to her life. The asthma was supposed to have been a pregnancy thing, but it had stayed with her after she’d given birth to Leah, along with the stretchmarks and the extra eight pounds of flesh around her middle. If anything, she seemed to be using the inhaler more than ever now. She took another breath and finally felt herself relax as the icy vapour made its way through her lungs, the sensation as much as the drug playing its part in calming her down.

  Another moment, and then she smiled at Eileen.

  ‘I’m okay now. Sorry about that.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  Eileen still looked concerned.

  ‘Why don’t you let me get you a cup of tea? Come on, we were going for a bun anyway. It’s a Saturday tradition, isn’t it, love?’

  She glanced down at the child in the duffel coat, who nodded solemnly.

  ‘Come on – we’d love you to join us.’

  Heather had planned to meet Marc and Leah in Bewley’s anyway. It made total sense for Eileen and her son to join them there.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘Mama!’

  Anna didn’t know many words, but she was able to use the ones she had very effectively. Hot, hungry, overslept and confused at having woken up in cramped and unfamiliar surroundings, she flung herself against the straps of the buggy and roared.

  ‘MAMA!’

  There was a second of silence and then an exclamation from the other side of the door.

  ‘What the—?’

  Not stopping to look at the child, Claire stepped into the corridor, closed the sliding door on the toilet area and flattened herself against the wall. From the other room she could hear the doctor make desperate, stuttering attempts to explain the noise away:

  ‘A baby? I’m not sure. I don’t hear anything . . .’

  ‘Get out of my way, Heather.’

  Then came the sound of a key rattling in the lock and the door to the annexe opened slowly. The gun in the woman’s hand shook slightly as she looked at Claire.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’

  Moving as smoothly as she could, Claire took one step away from the wall, her hands held loosely in front of her, palms out.

  ‘I’m Claire. I don’t want to hurt you.’

  Her eyes flickered over the woman’s shoulder to where she could see the doctor standing, hand pressed to her mouth, shoulders rigid with fear. Claire caught her eye for a second and gave a barely imperceptible shake of her head, hoping she’d have the cop on to stay exactly where she was. The woman’s hand was on the trigger. Any stupid move now and she would pull it. The thought of a gun going off in this tiny space . . .

  All of a sudden Claire’s shoulders slumped and, when she spoke again, it was through barely suppressed tears.

  ‘My baby is in there! Please don’t hurt her.’

  Hearing her mother’s voice, Anna’s wails rose again and Claire let out a large, matching sob.

  ‘Please, do whatever you want to me, but don’t hurt her.’

  The woman frowned and turned her head slightly in the direction of the door. ‘Why would there be a baby . . . ?’Her momentary distraction gave Claire the gap she had been waiting for and she lunged forward, slapping the gun downwards and positioning herself between the woman and the toilet door. She grabbed the woman’s wrist with her other hand, squeezing it until her grip on the weapon loosened, then grabbed the weapon and pushed backwards with her shoulder, slamming her against the door frame. The woman grunted as air was expelled from her body. Then her grip slipped and the gun was in Claire’s hand, her assailant pinned behind her.

  ‘Take this! Top shelf – now!’

  The doctor blinked in confusion as Claire handed her the gun. She stared at it blankly for a moment, then turned and, following Claire’s instructions, put it on a shelf high above her head. Claire was almost sitting on the woman now and had to shout to be heard over the baby’s yells. ‘I need something to tie her up!’

  All of a sudden the doctor’s medical training kicked in and, moving quickly but calmly, she reached for a roll of tape that was sitting on her desk, opened the end and handed it to Claire, who began to bind the woman’s hands together.

  ‘What’s her name? Eileen, is it?’

  Claire threw the question over her shoulder to the doctor who was now leaning heavily against her desk.

  ‘Yeah. Eileen Delaney.’

  Claire bent forward.

  ‘Okay, Eileen.’

  Their three heads lifted as the doorbell pealed. Thank God, Claire thought with relief, reinforcements. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the situation under control – in fact, Eileen was putting up no resistance now, and taping her limbs together had been like working on one of the dummies on which they’d practised CPR in training college. But Claire needed someone else to take over so she could go to Anna, whose wails of distress were growing more acute.

  Making a final check tha
t the wrist bindings were secure, she looked up at the doctor.

  ‘Stay where you are. I’ll be back in a second.’

  As she strode through the surgery and out into the hall, Claire’s mind calmly catalogued the events of the last few minutes, preparing already for the inevitable debrief. Was she happy with how things had gone? Yeah, pretty much. The woman was clearly unstable and had been in control of a weapon. Claire had followed her training, distracting and then disarming her, and had only used the force necessary to bring her under control. Could she have intervened earlier? Possibly, but she’d had two hostages to think of, including her own child. No, she had played things properly. Everything was fine. It had all gone quite well, really. She just needed to hand Eileen over now and . . .

  Still lost in thought as she opened the front door, it took her a moment to process the fact that she wasn’t looking at a garda uniform. It wasn’t a uniform at all, but an orange plastic jacket.

  ‘Feck’s sake.’

  Furious, Claire flapped her hand at the newspaper-seller.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to come here – I needed you to call the police! Do you understand me? The police? Polizia? Christ! Do you even speak English?’

  Wordlessly, the man pushed past her and, pulling the door behind him, strode into the hall. Claire ran after him.

  ‘You don’t understand! You can’t go in there!’

  But the newspaper-seller had disappeared into the surgery. As she ran to catch up with him she saw him walk over to Eileen, who was slumped on the floor, arms still taped behind her back. When Eileen saw him, she started to weep.

  ‘It’s all gone wrong! I didn’t mean— There’s a baby in here! A baby – I didn’t know!’

  The man raised his hand sharply.

  ‘Shut up! Shut up, will you? I have to think.’

  He glanced around the room, then spotted the gun, high on the shelf, a half-beat before Claire remembered it. Even as he was pulling it towards him, realization dawned on her. Why would a newspaper-seller have been out there in the first place? Standing on an almost empty street, a road few cars ever drove down. No one would be there to buy newspapers from him, not at that time of day.

  And then the man was beside her, pressing the barrel of the gun into her side.

  Claire took a breath, struggling to sound calm.

  ‘You don’t want to do this. I’m—’

  ‘Stay quiet!’

  Irritated, the man shoved her away from him and, caught off balance, Claire stumbled, her head cracking against the table on the way down. As her vision greyed and the room disappeared, the last thing she heard were her daughter’s increasingly desperate cries.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Heather, 2000

  As Heather picked her way through the closely packed tables in Bewley’s, she could feel the stress of the morning melting away. There was something about Dublin’s legendary café that instantly cheered her. The smell of roasting coffee and warm scones. The sight of Dubliners, of all ages and backgrounds, getting ‘set up for the day’ with a full Irish, or setting the world to rights over tea and iced buns. In one corner a stunning dark-haired young woman, who looked very like Sinéad O’Connor, was having a passionate debate with an older man, one of those blokes, Heather thought, who turned up on the Late Late every so often when they needed someone with Opinions. It was Sinéad O’Connor, she realized belatedly, and tried to stop herself staring. In another corner, a punk with a green-tipped blond Mohican was gently pressing his teabag against the side of his mug while holding an ancient Penguin paperback in his other hand. Only in Bewley’s.

  When she and her parents had first moved to Ireland, she used to come here with her mother all the time. Heather’s mom claimed it was the only place in Dublin she could get a decent New York-style cup of coffee. That wasn’t true: the coffee was more authentic – and cheaper – in McDonald’s on the other side of Grafton Street, but Heather’s right-on vegetarian mother wouldn’t dream of admitting such a thing. So, they’d visited Bewley’s every time they came into the city – or ‘town’, as Heather learned to call it – particularly on the frequent occasions when Heather’s mother had wanted to get away from Heather’s father. In fact, it was to Bewley’s they had gone when her mother told Heather she was leaving her dad, and taking Heather back to the States with her. It was to Bewley’s that Heather had come, alone, when that plan hadn’t worked out, and she was fired unceremoniously back to her father’s house at the age of sixteen.

  It was to Bewley’s she had come that first Christmas Eve after her return to try to manufacture the spirit that was absent at home, and it was to Bewley’s she had come to drink watery tea – coffee was making her nauseous – when she’d told Marc the News.

  ‘White coffee? Sorry – I never thought to ask.’

  ‘That’s perfect.’

  Heather smiled up at Eileen as she placed the tray on the table, coffee slopping over the sides of the giant mugs.

  ‘There you go now, lovey.’

  Her old school friend settled an iced bun and a glass of orange juice in front of her small, silent boy.

  ‘We come in here every Saturday, don’t we, pet? A little treat. Sure it doesn’t do us any harm.’

  And, with a bite of cherry bun and the taste of creamy coffee on their lips, Heather Gilmore and Eileen Delaney found they had lots to talk about. There was motherhood, of course – their children were almost exactly the same age – and Heather found herself laughing helplessly about sleepless nights and tantrums, baby toenails and the type of temperature that, no matter how many medical textbooks she had read, would always cause panic at 3 a.m. But there was plenty of non-child-related stuff to talk about too. Whom they’d kept in touch with from school and, more interestingly, whom they hadn’t. What they’d been up to in the intervening years. Eileen had studied marketing, she told Heather, but had found it difficult to keep up a full-time job after Alan was born. She’d been working in retail now for the past two years and loved it. Her shifts made it easier to spend time with her little boy too. She was still living with her dad, she said, and he was great with Alan. Gas, wasn’t it? He’d never changed Eileen’s nappy when she was young, but he could do his grandson’s on his lap with one eye on the TV. Alan’s father didn’t seem to be in the picture and Heather didn’t ask about him. Eileen’s happiness, her joy in her life and her son, was obvious to see.

  ‘I thought of you, you know, when it happened!’

  ‘Huh?’

  The sentence was so unexpected, Heather looked at Eileen to make sure she’d heard her correctly. Eileen smiled shyly and took a sip of coffee.

  ‘When I found out I was pregnant. I thought, What would Heather Sterling do?’

  ‘Really?’

  Heather wanted to laugh – the notion sounded so absurd – but she could see the other woman was deadly serious.

  ‘Yeah,’ Eileen continued. ‘You know me – or you did. The best girl in the class, even my mam dying didn’t stop me passing my exams, going to college. Getting pregnant wasn’t what happened to people like me. So when I found out, I thought, Well, what would Heather do? I was thinking back to – do you remember? – your twelfth-birthday party. You were so cool, and so . . . I don’t know, I suppose resilient is the word. Those girls were like sheep and you were like this exotic being in the middle of them, and it didn’t matter a damn to you what they thought of you. You were going to wear what you liked and do what you liked! So I tried to channel a bit of that when I found out I was expecting. I thought I’d do what I wanted to do, not what other people expected. And it worked!’

  She looked across at the little boy who was now moving flakes of bun around the shiny table top with his finger, completely content.

  ‘It worked brilliantly.’

  Her gaze rested on him for a moment. Then she looked back at Heather and smiled.

&
nbsp; ‘Anyway, enough about me. How have things been with you?’

  She stage-winked at Heather’s trio of engagement, wedding and eternity rings.

  ‘Tell me all! It’s not what I expected, anyway. Heather Sterling a respectable married woman! Who is he? Where did you two meet?’

  Heather gave her the quick version, the story she’d honed through years of telling it to Marc’s friends. The story of how one of her college friends had been nominated for a student journalism award and had brought Heather to the black-tie ceremony as his date. The man sitting to her right at dinner had been a representative of the accountancy firm that sponsored the awards, sent along, he told her, with a straight face, because he was the only person in the office who could even remember his student years. It was the first time Marc had made Heather laugh, but not the last, and as her friend guzzled the free wine to steady his nerves, she found her companion’s dry commentary on the evening far more entertaining.

  Marc was the only man in the room, Heather told Eileen, who looked as if he hadn’t rented his tuxedo for the night. He was also the only one who didn’t grimace when the band began to play, but instead stood up and asked Heather to dance, with a serious expression on his face for the first time that evening.

  The student journalist was face down in his dessert by the time the music finished and didn’t notice them leave. Marc brought Heather back to his apartment – a real bachelor pad, she told Eileen, genuinely laughing at the memory, with an L-shaped black leather couch and a smoked-glass coffee table. Used to shared student flats or boys who still lived with their parents, Heather couldn’t help but be impressed. It was more impressive still to discover, the next morning, that there was milk in the fridge and no need for anyone to go out and buy breakfast. They found out she was expecting Leah three months later and were married before their daughter was born.

  ‘Just in case Sister Catherine found out,’ she concluded, smiling at the memory. Eileen smiled too, delighted by the romance of it all. So what, Heather thought, as her friend wiped the icing from her little boy’s mouth and encouraged him to finish his drink, if that wasn’t the whole story? It was near enough, wasn’t it?