The ring-tone on Jim’s mobile phone suddenly annihilated the silence of the car, startling him. Still in the fog of memory the book’s pages had generated, he answered it without thinking.
‘Oh,’ he heard Noreen say. ‘I didn’t expect you to pick up. I was just going to leave a message. Aren’t you at work?’
‘What is it, Nor?’
‘Katie’s coming for dinner.’ Even though their daughter had allegedly moved out, into student digs near the university on College Road, she seemed to be around their house as much as ever. ‘So I need you to grab a few things from Centra on the way home.’
Jim looked at the book on his lap. ‘And why can’t you walk up there and get them?’
‘Money,’ Noreen said quietly.
‘But I gave you plenty on Friday. Where did it all go?’
‘On the bills, Jim. And the food we’ve eaten so far this week. I can’t just—’
‘Text me a list.’
Jim ended the call and threw the phone back on to the passenger seat. He refused to listen to her when she was hysterical. It gave him a headache.
And he wanted to get back to the book.
Eve Black had found the knife and the rope, then. That was news to him. They’d still been there when he went to collect them on the night of the attack, so there was no way he could’ve known. That was an interesting revelation, even if it changed nothing. And Spanish Point. He’d never been there, but he knew where it was. That was a question answered. He’d always wondered where she’d disappeared to after the attack. Childhood memories: boring. He didn’t care who any of these people had been.
The lie was interesting, though.
Or, to give Eve the benefit of the doubt for now, the mis-remembering.
Would she describe the events of that night in detail, of the night? What would she say? He was very tempted to skip ahead and see.
But he also wanted to savour it.
Reading it was stirring something. A feeling. The feeling. It was just like the voice of a great friend you’d lost touch with: you couldn’t remember it at all but once you were reminded of it, you couldn’t believe you’d ever forgotten it.
He would have to, though. He was nearly sixty-three years old. He couldn’t move as fast as he used to.
He didn’t have the energy any more for all … that.
It was half past one. He normally got home from work around three fifteen, so allowing for him to get out to the suburbs in after-school traffic and stop at the shop, he figured he was safe for another forty-five minutes or so.
Jim’s phone beeped: a text from Noreen.
Chicken breasts, oven chips, mushrooms, bottle of white wine.
No please or thank you. And she could forget about the white wine. Jim wasn’t about to serve his own eighteen-year-old daughter alcohol on a Tuesday night and anyway, Katie wouldn’t want it. She got up at the crack of dawn every morning to hit the gym.
And did Noreen think he was made of money?
Jim set a timer on his phone and went back to his book.
Instead, he heard his father shouting.
He was telling Tommy to ring the Gardaí.
From the outside, the O’Sullivan house was aggressively unremarkable. It was a bungalow, typical of the kind that littered the Irish countryside but made no effort to connect with it: a squat, rectangular box built of dirty grey brick, set back from the road. The windows looked both too short and too wide, as if they were being uncomfortably compressed by the pressure of the pitched roof, heavy with dirty slate tiles. Aurora – the name was etched into a brass plaque by the front door – had been built from a book of plans in 1978. Since then, its only update had been a conservatory built on to the back by a cowboy builder who’d disappeared before the job was done, leaving a room too cold to sit in for ten months of the year and a set of French doors that didn’t lock properly.
Tommy’s parents, Alice and Shane O’Sullivan, had met at a birthday party in Blarney when they were both nineteen. She was originally from Clonakilty, he from Bandon; on that first evening they’d drawn vocal maps of mutual friends and common places and marvelled at how they had never crossed paths before. Since then, their shared life had moved easily along the path it was supposed to. They’d dated for three years, then married and bought the house. Alice was pregnant with Tommy within twelve months. Shane got into the bank and began working his way up. Three more kids arrived, one more than Alice had imagined having.
It’d been tough there for a while, manic even, but now the kids were growing up and Alice felt she had some space to breathe again. Shane had been appointed branch manager in Douglas three months ago, so there was not only time to think but a little money to spend, too. Alice had started saving her Children’s Allowance when, not that long ago, she had relied on it. And she’d started making plans. A family holiday abroad, ideally in France. A new extension that would give them the extra bedroom they needed to give each child their own. Knocking down that God-awful conservatory.
It was Alice who met him first.
In the early hours of 14 January 2000, she awoke to find herself blinded by a bright, white light. It was all she could see. When she closed her eyes, it seemed to barely dim. It crossed her mind that she might be having a stroke or some kind of brain haemorrhage. That headache she’d had the other day – should she have gone to the doctor about it? Was it too late now? Frantic, Alice patted the bed beside her, searching for the warm shape of Shane’s body, trying to alert him that something was terribly, terribly wrong, but something – someone – grabbed her before she could. The light changed, its epicentre swinging away from her, replaced with a heavy weight on her body, pressing her down, pushing something sharp into the soft flesh of her neck.
It all came together in one horrific flash of understanding. The light was a head torch strapped to the forehead of a masked man who shouldn’t be in her home but who was, who was now climbing on top of her, his right arm pinning her left to the bed just inches from the fabric of Shane’s T-shirt and his left pressing something sharp into her neck. He smelled like wet leaves and earth and there was something on his breath, familiar but mildly unpleasant. Was that … coffee?
A gloved hand clamped down so hard on her mouth that Alice tasted metal. The force of it had made her gums bleed.
‘Don’t make a sound,’ the intruder whispered. ‘I’ll slit your throat. Then I’ll slit everyone else’s, one by one. Nod if you understand.’
Alice did.
Her whole body was shaking so badly, she couldn’t understand why Shane hadn’t already woken up. But then Shane did stir. She felt the movement beneath her own body, heard the creak of the springs in the mattress as he rearranged his limbs. But then there was the sigh of her husband’s breath as he settled back to sleep.
The weight disappeared off her body and the light in the room changed, returning to the state she would’ve expected: dark, with a sliver of weak light from the bulb further down the hall pushing through the few inches of open door. It happened so fast, Alice thought for a moment that she had only now woken up and that everything in the last ten seconds had been the tail-end of a dream, a horribly vivid nightmare, like those ones where you think you’re late only to wake up and discover that you still have plenty of time. Relief was flooding her veins when, under the covers, a hand came at her from the wrong side and yanked hard on her foot.