He moved the nuzzle of the gun to her temple and his free hand to her neck. Spread his fingers around it. Squeezed as hard as he could.
Eve cried out.
He gripped the skin until she was gasping and had started to struggle and thrash.
‘Tell me,’ he spat.
He released her and waited while she gulped down air.
‘Last chance, Eve.’
She was crying now, hard, the tears on her cheeks glistening in the beam of the torchlight.
She whispered something but he didn’t catch it.
He told her to repeat it.
She said, ‘I thought it was you.’
Her voice had become raspy.
‘I was trying to save my family,’ she said. ‘I pushed my father down the stairs because I thought he was you.’
But of course.
He felt foolish for not realising it sooner. When she’d suddenly come running out of that bathroom all those years ago with two hands stretched out in front of her, and charged up against the man standing at the top of the stairs, she’d thought it was Jim she was pushing down it.
But then she’d seen the body in the light of the hall, and Jim standing there looking up at her, and realised her mistake.
Her terrible mistake.
But now he saw that he’d made one, too.
He should’ve charged upstairs and killed her, right there and then. No hesitation. She’d seen his face and he had been planning on doing it anyway before he left the house. But he’d just seen her kill her own father. A twelve-year-old girl had murdered her daddy in front of him and he had no idea why. Was it because the girl was bad? Or because the daddy had been? What had been going on in this house?
Jim didn’t know. He was suddenly missing most of the information. His control ran away.
And then he did, turning and running through the kitchen, out the back door and into the night.
But he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
The gun was at Eve’s neck. Jim put his left hand to his mouth and pulled off the leather glove with his teeth. Slowly. Keeping his eyes on Eve’s the whole time. Then he did the same thing to the Latex glove underneath.
‘What about my questions?’ she asked.
He ignored her.
‘Just tell me why,’ she said. ‘Why us? Why didn’t you just lock us up like the O’Sullivan children?’ Her voice cracked. ‘Why did you destroy my family? For what purpose? And why did you leave me alive? Why Anna? Why a little girl, you sick fuck?’
Jim made a ssshhh noise. He pushed back the blankets with his bare hand and lowered his jaw so the torch shone directly on the smooth, pale skin of Eve’s neck and, below it, the curved promise of her breasts.
He touched his bare hand to her skin. Pressed it against it.
Eve started protesting, squirming.
Her skin was warm and soft. She was wearing a top with a low, round neck and no sleeves. He traced the edges of the material from one shoulder to the other with a single finger.
Once left to right. Once right to left.
Then he slipped the finger underneath and on to the soft pillow of her breast, pulling the material away from the skin, putting his whole hand inside, cupping her bare breast, feeling the nipple turn hard against the palm, moving to squeeze it—
Eve screamed.
A sound as loud and as piercing as anything Jim had ever heard.
But not, then, the only sound.
Beyond it, underneath it, there was an oncoming rush of noise.
What the—
Footsteps.
Shouting.
People.
Then suddenly bodies were rushing into the room and someone was shouting.
‘Drop it! Drop your weapon! Drop it right now!’
Jim didn’t have time to react.
There was a flash and an impact that rocked his entire body, sending him backwards off the bed and on to the floor. He lost the gun. He landed on his side and rolled until he was face-down on the carpet. He touched a hand to his left side where the epicentre of whatever had just happened seemed to be. When he lifted it to his face, he saw that it was covered in blood, glistening and red.
‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’
A new voice. Male.
Jim tried to say, ‘No,’ but no words came out.
He tried to roll over on to his back so he could see what was happening. He only made it halfway, but that was far enough.
Ed Fucking Healy.
He was on the bed, gathering a crying Eve into his arms.
There were dark figures all around the room, coming towards him, bending down.
Gardaí.
With guns and baseball caps.
The Armed Response Unit.
The pain began to subside but Jim understood now what was happening, that that wasn’t good news.
It’s time for you to end this, Noreen had told him.
The darkness came creeping slowly on to the edges of his vision, then suddenly rushed in from all sides until there was nothing left but a tiny pinprick of light in the middle.
And then there was nothing at all.
ONE YEAR LATER
Katie lies awake, waiting for her alarm to go off. The tent is hot and stuffy and smells of someone else’s body odour. She can feel the springs of the camp bed’s thin mattress poking into her back. Her sleeping bag, only pulled up to her knees, holds a warm sweat that glues the synthetic lining to her calves.
She lasts another minute before she gets up, disables the alarm and pulls on her uniform of brightly coloured cotton shorts and a matching T-shirt. She grabs a towel and walks outside.
The campsite feels deserted at this hour. The only sound is birdsong and the soft rhythm of distant waves. The forecast has promised another thirty-degree day and the air is already warm.
Katie takes a long, cold shower in the toilet block and has a breakfast of coffee and two cigarettes at the site’s poolside café. Technically staff are not supposed to sit in guest areas in uniform and certainly not while they’re smoking, but no one else is here yet except the waiter and the guy with a net lifting leaves from the pool. They speak to each other in French and act as if Katie isn’t there. That’s the best she can hope for these days: to be ignored.
She’s been here, a seaside resort on the south-west coast of France, for months. She heard about the job while eavesdropping on a couple of British Inter-Railers at a restaurant in the nearest town, where she’d just spent her last ten euro on a hot meal and was facing a second night of sleeping on the beach. She’d hitched a ride here with a Frenchman who was leering at her before her seatbelt was even on, but Katie is no longer afraid of men. It feels pointless to be. She’s already seen the worst of them and called him her father.
She doesn’t often think about time and dates but now that the season is winding down, the new arrivals thinning out, it’s hard to ignore the fact that in a few days, it’ll be September. The first anniversary of the end of everything.
Katie is in exile. The rest of the world feels separate here, far away. She has no phone. The only TVs on site are the ones in the bar, which always seem to be tuned to football matches. The work is menial so she doesn’t have to think about it, the accommodation monastic, her days monotonous and simple.
It suits her.
It’s penance.
‘Excuse me?’ A customer – the short, smiling, chubby woman who’s been staying with her family in one of their Riviera Deluxe models for the past week – is standing in front of Katie, blocking her sun. ‘Sorry to bother you, love, but we’re about to hit the road to Roscoff and I’m just wondering if there’s any chance you can let me into reception for a second just to switch out these books …?’ She’s holding two bloated, battered paperbacks that have been evidently tarnished by sea water and sunscreen. Her other hand is pointing over her shoulder at a car stuffed with children. The husband is in the driver’s seat. When he sees them looking, he pointedly raises his watch to the window.