Eager to Please (37 page)

It was late when he left the bar. Heading for two. The cops were still there, still parked by his car. He barely glanced at them as he started walking towards Glasthule. His step was unsteady.
He swayed as he moved. He hailed a taxi just outside Sandycove. He gave the guy a big fat tip when he let him off at the gate to the house.

‘Goodnight, mate,’ he said, extra loud, and waited to see the cops arrive before heading for the front door. He dropped the newspapers in a heap beside his bed. He’d read them
all again in the morning and listen to the latest in the news bulletins. And wait. But not for long. He knew that. It was the only way to make Rachel show herself. She wouldn’t be able to
stay away if Amy was in trouble. And Amy knew that too. That was why she had agreed to help him. He explained what he wanted to do. He would hide her in an apartment in the city. She would have
everything she needed. It would only be for a few days, until Rachel came forward. And then she would be free. And he would be free. And Rachel would be back where she belonged. Behind bars
again.

‘You will help me, Amy, won’t you? I’ll make it up to you, all those years together we missed. You know I wanted you, I wanted us to be a family, but she didn’t. She was
prepared to deny you that, and me too. But once this is over we can never be separated again. Do you agree?’

And what would he have done if she had said she wouldn’t go along with it? He had thought about that too. He was desperate. It had to be done one way or the other. One way was the easy
way. The compliant way. The best way. The other was the bottle of chloroform and the pad of cotton wool, the handcuffs and the gag. He had wondered, when he asked her, which way it would go. But
she just looked at him with his grey eyes, her straight black eyebrows furrowed together across the bridge of her nose the way his did, and said, ‘Of course I’ll do it. She can’t
be allowed to get away with this.’

And told him how she would go out with her friends, and meet him in town, and not go home.

‘You won’t be able to tell anyone, you know that, don’t you? Your foster-parents will be worried. You do realize, don’t you?’

She nodded.

‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘They’ll understand, afterwards, when I explain it to them. They’ll get over it.’

‘I’ll never be able to thank you for this, Amy,’ he said, and he kissed her gently on her cheek.

And now he waited. Wherever Rachel was she would want to see the newspapers. She was waiting to see when he was going to be charged with her murder. And when she read about Amy she would know it
was him. And she would come. And when she did, he’d be waiting.

A
NDREW HAD STOPPED
going into work. He had gone to the doctor, Clare’s doctor, and told him that he couldn’t cope any longer. He had asked
for medication, antidepressants, tranquillizers, whatever they were called. The doctor had examined him, taken his blood pressure, noted his bad colour, his thinness. Told him he wasn’t
eating properly, that he was drinking too much, that he should watch it. He was no use to his wife in this condition.

‘Perhaps the time has come, Andy, to get her some residential care. Give you a bit of a break.’

But he wouldn’t hear of it. What would he have without her? His life was so bounded by her needs. He couldn’t imagine how he would fill his time if he didn’t have Clare to look
after.

He went home, his pills in his pocket, and poured himself a large vodka. They sat together that night. The door to the garden was open. There was a smell of new-mown grass. The boy from next
door had cut it. Piled it into little round hillocks all over the lawn.

She asked him to put on some music.

‘You choose,’ she said.

He picked Elgar. The song ‘Where Corals Lie’, sung by Janet Baker. He set the CD player to repeat. Over and over again. They sat in the dark and listened to the words. Clare asked
him about Rachel Beckett, what was the latest news?

‘I miss her,’ she said. ‘I liked her. Do you think she’s dead?’

She began to cough. Her chest was congested. It was pneumonia again, he was sure of it. He listened to the words of the song.

‘What did she have to live for?’ he asked.

‘Her daughter, her future. She wanted redemption. I know she did.’

He said nothing.

‘We talked about, you know . . . We talked about how it might be for you after I’ve gone. I told her what we wanted to do. I asked her how you would feel. I asked her how she
felt.’

‘And.’

Clare didn’t reply. He looked at her. She lay quietly curled on her side. Her eyes were closed. She had stopped taking her antibiotics. She told him she had had enough.

‘It’s time, Andy. Now it’s time.’

He listened to the music.

‘Andy, please, I’m so cold.’

He got up and walked over to the bed. He lay down beside her and pulled her head on to his chest. She coughed and coughed. He sat up and pulled her up beside him.

‘Hush,’ he said, ‘hush. Go to sleep. It’ll be better in the morning.’

He picked up her glass. He put her pills into her mouth. He gently poured the juice between her lips. She swallowed, choked, swallowed again. She closed her eyes. He listened again to the words
of the song.

He remembered one night he had come home and seen Rachel here with his wife. He had walked across the garden and watched them through the window. He had seen the way that Rachel held her, warmed
her, wasn’t afraid to be close to her. Wasn’t frightened of her dependency, her pain. He listened now to Clare’s breathing. It was quiet and slow. He laid her back down on the
bed. He picked up the pillow. He pressed down hard against her face. He waited. One of her hands moved, stirred, lifted, dropped back down on the bed.

‘No,’ the word burst from him. He snatched away the pillow. He laid his head on her chest. Felt the tremor of breath. He held her face between his hands and kissed her gently on
either cheek, and then finally on her mouth. She stirred in her sleep. He lay down beside her and pulled her close. He closed his eyes. He slept.

I
T WAS A
girl’s voice. An adolescent girl’s voice. Not yet the voice of an adult. But deeper, more resonant than the voice of a child. Jack
had never heard it before. But he knew immediately who it was, this sobbing creature who cried out for help.

Mummy, Mummy, please. Mummy, help me. Are you listening, Mummy? Do you hear me? Please come and find me. I know you’re out there somewhere. I know you want to help me. I need you now
more than I’ve ever needed you before. So please, come back from wherever you are. Please.

And then the cry, a long howl of anguish and fear. Then silence. The tape ended abruptly. Nothing more but the hiss of the machine.

The package had arrived in the first post of the day. It had been lying on his desk with all the rest of the junk. He had picked it up, weighed the padded envelope in his hand, looked at the
postmark, looked at the label with his name and address printed on it, then gone to the coffee machine. He was tired. Alison had stayed with him last night, and he didn’t think either of them
had got much more than a couple of hours of rest. When he sat down at his desk the longing for sleep had begun to wash over him. And for a moment he had contemplated going sick, sneaking home to
crash out on the bed, burying his face in the pillows that smelt of Alison. But he had pushed the thought from him as he picked up the tape again, hunted in his top drawer for his Walkman, slotted
it in, pressed play and listened, and felt the bile rise up into his mouth, and the sensation of a stream of iced water slide down his backbone. He pressed the rewind button, then pressed play, and
listened again.

The mid-morning traffic along the sea road and over the toll bridge was nearly as densely packed as the rush-hour crush three hours earlier. He had brought the tape with him, and he played it
again and again as the car crept forward. Outside it was raining. A steady leaden downpour that sluiced over the windscreen like the stream from a hosepipe. He sat and listened, the windscreen
wipers turned to slow, and waited.

Her foster-parents had been sent the tape too. And the local guards who were dealing with the girl’s disappearance. The parents were frantic. Phil Brady, the inspector from Clontarf, was
at a loss. ‘You’d better come over here, Jack. Give us a bit of a dig-out. Maybe you can make some sense from all of this. Because I can’t.’

Christ Almighty, frantic parents. He felt he couldn’t cope with them any longer. Or maybe it was just that he’d been better at the personal stuff when he was newer to the job. Or
maybe it had just seemed easier, and maybe back then they hadn’t set so much store by it. You weren’t expected to have a postgraduate degree in meaningful dialoguing, or basic bullshit
about bereavement as he privately termed it.

Not that, so far, bereavement was on the agenda. The girl was missing, not dead. Not so far. Although the parents, the foster-parents as he had to keep on reminding himself, didn’t see it
that way. They were doing a good job of preparing themselves for the worst. It was spelt out in the rigor of their stiff white faces, and the way they had already begun to speak of Amy in the past
tense.

He sat with them in their small tidy front room, drinking tea, refusing biscuits. There was nothing in their demeanour to suggest that Amy Beckett, or Williams as she called herself, was not
their own child. There were photographs of her everywhere. Along with the pictures of their other four children. But it was easy to spot the odd one out. The Williams brood were fair to mousy, with
round faces and snub noses. Cute when toddlers but undistinguished as teenagers and young adults. The kind of people you’d pass in the street. The kind of faces that were never picked out in
identity parades. Unlike Amy. He walked around the Williamses’ sitting room, looking at the framed photographs hanging on the wall. Mostly school pictures. First communions and confirmations.
Amy’s steady gaze followed him as he moved. He could feel her eyes on his back as he turned away. He was reminded of the painting of the Sacred Heart that hung on their landing when he was a
kid. The crucified Christ would catch his eye as he walked slowly up towards him, and he would still be watching as he turned quickly at the top of the stairs. That same steady mournful look.

He asked Mrs Williams if he could see the girl’s room. She opened the door without a word and showed him the way. No Sacred Hearts to be seen on their landing, he noticed, just a series of
watercolours. Flower paintings. Detailed, precise, like plates from a botanical reference book. He stopped and looked more closely.

‘Yours?’ he asked.

‘No, my husband’s.’

‘A nice hobby to have.’

‘Oh,’ she looked back at him, ‘not quite a hobby. More of an obsession. And one that Amy used to share when she was younger. They used to go off on collecting trips. She was
quite expert, very sharp-eyed, great attention to detail. She would find the plants and Dave would paint them.’

‘Would, was, not any longer?’

‘Well,’ Mrs Williams pushed open the bedroom door, ‘as you can see, adolescence took over.’

So this was what he had ahead of him, he thought as he looked around at the posters that covered all four walls and the ceiling too.

‘Quite a job, isn’t it?’ Mrs Williams craned her head to look up at them. ‘That’s our Amy. When she decides to do something she goes all the way.’

‘Your Amy?’ Jack sat down on the stool by the small wooden desk. ‘You do think of her as yours, do you?’

‘Well, whose else is she? She came to us when she was barely five. I think you could say we’ve taught her everything she knows. Our children taught her how to be a sister. My husband
and I taught her how to be a daughter. My mother and father taught her how to be a granddaughter.’

‘And her own mother, what did she teach her?’

There was silence in the small stuffy room.

‘Well, I suppose to be fair she didn’t have much of a chance. And she did give a her good start, I’ll say that for her, especially with her intellectual development. Amy was
always very bright. She already knew her alphabet when she came to us. She could count, she had her favourite books and stories. Look,’ she stood in front of him, the skin of her face sagging
with anxiety, ‘don’t get me wrong. I know she isn’t ours, not ours by adoption. And as foster-parents we’ve always been very conscious that she might only be with us for a
short time. We know all about that. We’ve fostered before. And if Amy had left us we would have fostered again. But there was always something special about her. Something very special.
She’s a very special person. Even that first day we met her, there was a quality about her that shone through. Even when she was like this.’

She picked up a framed photograph from the desk and held it out to him. He looked at the little girl in the bright blue dress, standing holding hands with a smiling man and woman.

‘We took it that first day. We always did that with all the children. We thought it would make them feel wanted. And when they left us we gave it to them as a memento. So many of them, you
see, don’t have things like this.’ Her voice broke and tears began to trickle from the corners of her eyes. She pulled a tissue from the cuff of her white blouse and wiped her nose.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to keep calm, for everyone’s sake, but I’m so worried about her.’

Afterwards, as he was driving back into the city centre, he could still smell the perfume that she was wearing. Blue Grass, that’s what it was. He remembered one of his aunt’s loved
it. She had boxes of soap and talcum powder all with the same delicate scent stashed in the top of her wardrobe. It had always puzzled him, the possibility of grass being anything other than bright
green. He puzzled now over the girl and what had happened to her. Mrs Williams had said that everything had been as normal. Amy was waiting for her Leaving Certificate results to come out. She had
a job in a local café. She seemed perfectly fine.