Whispers in the Mist (33 page)

And then. Toby’s violent birth—more violent than McIlvoy’s attack, it had seemed to Gemma, who had witnessed the second assault on her mam’s body through a knothole in the chest. An emergency Caesarean that had looked like a massacre. A bloodbath.

And then. The squirming and squalling live thing that had come out of her precious mam’s stomach. Nothing but a monster whose first loud wail had drowned out the world.

And then. Gemma had disappeared for a while, a long while, until she’d woken up one day in a care facility, awake but not whole.

And now? She wasn’t sure she could live in the world with these memories. But then, this is what she’d wished for, hadn’t she? She’d insisted on begging a lift to Lisfenora when Dermot had left. She had pushed herself toward this outcome. And now that she had the outcome, she wanted nothing to do with it.

She’d never be whole. She understood that now. She would always be the quiet girl who didn’t handle people well. This was who she was. Her dreams of a miraculous recovery were nothing but a grand fiction.

“You’ve got some nasty cuts on your feet,” Alan said. “But no stitches required.”

Alan’s voice startled her from her reverie. She’d have to watch that, the way she lost track of the outside world. Her hand snaked up, gesticulating in its automatic fashion. Oh, that too. She had so much retraining ahead of her.

Gemma opened her eyes. She’d sunk so deep into Gemma World that she hadn’t realized they were closed. Alan sat next to her feet with a bowl of warm water on his lap. He submerged a wash rag and squeezed out the excess water. Rather than rubbing, he pressed the cloth up against the bottom of her left foot, then her right. He squinted and pressed harder near the ball of her foot. She twitched away from the pain.

He raised his hands, glancing at her, then away, then back at her and holding. “Oh. You’re here then.”

She nodded. Boy, was she.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d—”

Fallen back into herself again. Yes, she knew what he meant. That would forever be the fear for anyone who knew her. And for herself too, she supposed. The proclivity would always be there. She understood this now also.

Alan excused himself and stepped out of the room. Rummaging sounds issued from somewhere behind her. A cabinet clicked shut, and then he was back with plasters and antibiotic ointment. “Right then.”

His fingertips tickled when he tapped her skin with ointment. She’d never been as fragile as Dermot had treated her, and now here sat Alan also treating her like she’d break in half. But now she could talk, and with spoken words, maybe people wouldn’t treat her like a porcelain doll. She opened her mouth.

Alan froze when the first scratchy sound came out. The skin on her face warmed—oh god, that reaction, the hard
tap-tap
of her heart—but she tried again. It was like her mam said to her all those years ago.
Say your words. It’s okay to say what you need, baby.

Gemma’s eyes watered and the pressure increased in her chest. She hadn’t realized she’d lost her mam’s voice too. Her voice urging Gemma toward becoming her best possible self.

“I—I—”

Horrible croaky sounds. Gemma caught her breath, and then the next thing out was a gasp. The pressure in her chest so tight, she almost couldn’t catch her breath. She struggled against every lost moment with her mam, the years spent in silence and despair.

“I—I—”

Alan held her hand. “You’re grand, you are.”

She almost choked on her need to speak the words, almost choked on backed-up tears. The words dribbled out of her. “I’m not that fragile.”

“What?”

Her voice. It wasn’t what she wanted. She’d always imagined something low, mellifluous, a cross between an actress and a blues singer. Instead, she sounded, well, girly. Not an ounce of feminine authority or wisdom to it. She sounded like the nine-year-old she was when her lips first glued themselves shut and her vocal cords froze.

“You can rub the ointment in harder,” she said, louder this time.

There. She’d said them. Her first words in seventeen years. It didn’t matter what the words were, just that they be.

“Right then,” Alan said. “I’ll press a little harder.”

Alan continued where he’d left off. The sting was okay. She could handle it.

“See?” she said. “Not so fragile.”

He smiled down at her feet. “You’re a funny odd creature, you are.”

Yes. She’d always been. She’d have to accept this about herself too.

“Where am I?”

“This is where Danny lives right now. Dermot brought you here after the attack and finding you in the forestry lands.”

Ellen, where is she? Is she okay?
Gemma struggled to her feet.
I can’t believe I didn’t remember that. We have to go.

“You’re signing,” Alan said.

She crawled around the room looking for her shoes. “Ellen,” she said.

The silence behind her was so loud she turned around. Alan folded a plaster over on itself. “Not good. She’s still unconscious.”

Gemma hung her head. It had been a repeat performance of her mam’s death. A woman—Ellen—enraging McIlvoy so much that he lashed out. Just like before. This had been the refrain in her head—
just like before, just like before
—when she’d bolted from Ellen’s house, her terror so vast—vast as the universe—that this time around she hadn’t even had the brains to call 999.

“Dermot?” She scrabbled back toward Alan and plucked a new plaster from the box. She slapped it and two more on her feet and returned to the ground. “My shoes?”

She didn’t care how her voice sounded now, or that she couldn’t speak above a whisper. Along with every other emotion that had erupted out of her today, she felt a searing resolve most of all. She had to finish this once and for all.

“Over here.” Alan led her to the corner of the room where someone had flung their knapsacks and sleeping bags. “Dermot is fine. He drove to Dublin to fetch your aunt. Aunt Tara?”

She nodded. Aunt Tara didn’t travel well on her own, so that made sense.

Gemma grabbed the first knapsack, looking for clean clothes and socks. This one was Dermot’s, but it didn’t matter. She found a jumper and pulled it on. Amongst the dirty clothes, a photo caught her eye.

Her mam, her dear mam. Looking so happy. She remembered this wedding portrait sitting on the fireplace mantel, the hopes Mam had had for a happy family when she married McIlvoy. The image showed just their faces, cheek-to-cheek and grinning. McIlvoy hadn’t seemed so bad. At first.

She pushed the photo at Alan, not wanting to touch it anymore. “Him. He did it. That’s him.”

Alan frowned. “I don’t recognize him.”

She found socks and trainers. She pulled them all on, including a scarf, and her hoodie, and stood without tying her trainers.

“I can talk now,” she said.

The statement was a revelation, a small source of power.

“You mean to the guards?” Alan said.

She swallowed. “To Danny, please. Not to everybody at once.”

FIFTY
-
EIGHT

S
EAMUS SWAYED IN A
gentle rhythm back and forth. “Now it can end. I’ll gladly rest me head in the gaol to have it all end.”

“Listen to me,” Danny said. “Can you do that?”

Seamus continued swaying, lost in his own world, mumbling to himself. The hours of wait inside the Garda station had withered Seamus. His shoulders slumped forward and his head almost bounced against the tabletop. The room stank of him, alcohol mixed with despair. He’d refused coffee and a solicitor.

“Let’s start with Gemma. Why did you attack her?”

Seamus swayed faster.

“The good thing is that you didn’t hurt her. The DPP might not bring charges against you at all. But I’m still wondering about your guilt. It can’t be about Brendan—”

“My son.” Seamus covered his face with his hands. His shoulders shook.

Danny scooted his chair so he sat closer to Seamus. “—because you couldn’t have killed your own son.”

Seamus mumbled something. Danny pulled his hands away from his face. “You need to speak up.” He felt bad but it needed to be done, so he continued with, “Brendan in a field, his neck broken. That wasn’t you—was it?”

“You’ve got it all wrong.”

Sometimes the trick was to get witnesses talking. Seamus was a far cry from Malcolm, who now sat in a room enjoying a chat with his solicitor while he waited for the team to return from Blackie’s Pasture. Meanwhile, Seamus was so mired in his own agony that he didn’t know what was good for him. Danny felt like a right bastard, but this was what he needed to exploit—Seamus’s helplessness and despair.

“I have it wrong?” Danny said. “What do I have wrong—John?”

Seamus froze. Then a second later he was up and pacing around the room, half leaning against the wall to support himself. “I wish I’d never heard that name. I wish I didn’t know anything about him.”

“Are you John McIlvoy?” Danny said.

Seamus knocked his head against the wall. “No, no, no.”

Danny grabbed him, turned him around, and helped him slide down the wall. “Okay, no ‘John.’ Okay?”

“It’s all my fault. All of it. I might as well have killed Brendan with me own hands.” Seamus grabbed Danny’s leg, and for the first time since Danny entered the room, held Danny’s gaze. “I let the Grey Man into our lives.”

Danny slipped down the wall so he was seated next to Seamus on the ground. He’d felt the same thing: that he’d somehow let Grey Man into his life too. Slithering in with the fog and still hovering—but cloaked. Danny was blind, somehow, to the truth of things. But he wasn’t sure which truth he was looking for anymore either. Too many truths had glommed together. Toby. Brendan. Gemma. Ellen. Malcolm. McIlvoy. Seamus. Nathan too.

And himself.

He’d missed the sign the sparrows had tried to convey to him.

“Malcolm said that you gave him Siobhan McNamara’s earrings—the ones that Toby Grealy was wearing when he died. Someone had stolen them off his body. You can see how it looks between that and attacking Gemma.”

Seamus stared at the blue wall across the room.

“You knew Toby Grealy. You can’t deny that. Brendan brought him home to meet you.”

Seamus closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. “He was trying to be helpful, is all. He knew I had an interest in anything to do with John McIlvoy. Because of Nathan Tate. Nathan was the one to first get me thinking, see, about how I might ensure my son’s future. I had befriended the man when he first arrived. And a most interesting story he had too. One mention of a hairless wanker who surely had a hand in his father’s death, and I knew he meant Malcolm.”

He spit out Malcolm’s name as if he couldn’t get the sound of it out of his mouth fast enough. Danny sat back, relaxed now. He had Seamus in the sweet spot; all he needed was a little prompting to keep talking. So, Danny prompted.

“So you pointed Nathan toward Malcolm—”

“Ay, and then I invited Nathan to be one of us crows at the Plough. Malcolm fancies he’s one of us too, that he does.”

“And Brendan?”

“Malcolm is always on about Firebird, how he’s going to expand its brand. So I let him know that I’d gotten wind that McIlvoy was found dead—not giving Nathan away, you see—and that I had to wonder what Malcolm had been up to. But, I could stop wondering if he’d give my lad a job, teach him about business, get him going on a stable future.”

“As a shop boy? That’s no future, is it?”

“Of course not, but it were a foot in, and I hoped to see Brendan take over the shop in the future. Malcolm can’t hold on to it forever. I wanted Brendan as safe as possible. That was always the goal.”

“And how was that going to happen?”

Seamus grimaced with his eyes still closed. “Oh, I hear you. You think I’m an egg short of a full dozen, but I were thinking more and more that Malcolm hid something big, and I planned to find out what that something was, and when I did, Malcolm would have to let Brendan in on the business. We’d enter into a deal.”

Danny thought about Brendan in all this: a son who’d almost died as a child; a son trying to please his dad; a son who wrote adventure stories that took him far away from reality. “What did Brendan think of your plans for him?”

Seamus opened his eyes. They were liquid with emotion. “If only he’d been the rebellious type. The type to tell me to feck off and let him be. The type to run away to make his own way in the world. But he weren’t, and I thought myself lucky for it. Now look at me.” Tears dribbled out the sides of his eyes, but he didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Like I said before, I might as well have killed Brendan meself.”

“And Toby?”

“Oh ay, my boy brought him around like a gift to me. And so it went, as soon as that poor lad laid out the earring maker’s blame for his birth mother’s death, well then, I thought myself content indeed. John McIlvoy, that Toby said, he’d be the jewelry maker, he’d be the murderer. And it seemed like Malcolm had his hermit jewelry maker right where he wanted him, didn’t he?” He bounced his head against the wall. “How could I know any better?”