Better Together (39 page)

‘I guess not,’ said Sheridan.

‘I was afraid of her ghost.’ Peter looked shamefaced.

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No. And I’ve never admitted this to another soul, not even Joe, so don’t you go blabbing about it either in print or in person.’

‘I won’t, don’t worry,’ she assured him. ‘But . . . did you actually
see
her ghost?’

‘Of course not.’ He laughed. ‘But I was terrified I might. It’s ridiculous of me, I know. I was only a kid then, and Mum was the first person I knew who’d died. It made a deep impression on me.’

‘Poor you.’ She sympathised. ‘All the same, I’m sure you had no need to be afraid of your mother, even if she was a ghost.’

‘She was a lovely person,’ Peter told her. ‘But troubled. I was afraid that if she came back, she’d be a wailing sort of ghost, and I didn’t want that.’

‘In what way was she troubled?’ asked Sheridan.

‘My father used to call her highly strung,’ replied Peter. ‘She was very intense. Things mattered to her. The sort of stuff that most of us ignore or get over used to rattle her. She couldn’t let it go.’

Sheridan nodded in understanding.

‘It used to cause a lot of tension between them. At the same time, she was great fun as a mother,’ Peter recalled. ‘She never seemed to mind us doing mad things. She allowed me to drive Dad’s car when I was about seven. She pushed the seat forward as far as it would go, and I could only barely reach the pedals, but she encouraged me. Dad nearly freaked when he found out.’

‘Did you drive on the roads?’ Sheridan was slightly shocked at the idea.

‘There wasn’t much traffic around here back then,’ said Peter. ‘It was probably a crazy thing to do all the same. Mum used to say that you have to live on the edge from time to time. I think she was sorry that she didn’t do more of it herself. She used to paint . . .’

‘Landscapes, portraits, that sort of thing?’

‘A bit of everything,’ said Peter. ‘Modern stuff too. Bright swathes of colour. Or sometimes dark swathes of colour depending on her mood.’

‘Did she have . . . well, not mental problems, but . . .’

‘She suffered from depression in her teens,’ said Peter. ‘She told me once that having a family saved her . . .’ His voice trailed off as both he and Sheridan remembered that Elva had died before she was forty and so hadn’t been saved at all.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Sheridan said. ‘I don’t want to upset you by asking you about things you’d rather forget.’

He smiled. ‘I’m not really upset. It was a long time ago, even though I remember it clearly. At least, I think I do. You know how it is, you think you’ve got total recall and then someone else tells you something completely different. We all remember things in different ways. But I do remember the day she died.’

‘That must have been awful.’

Peter nodded, a distant expression in his eyes. ‘We – me and Joe and Sinead and Cushla – were at a party. It was quite odd all of us being out together. After all, Joe was nearly seventeen at the time and Cushla was only ten. It wasn’t as though we generally hung around with the same people. But it was – oh, someone’s birthday, someone that the whole family knew.’ His brow furrowed with the effort of remembering. ‘You’d think I’d remember who exactly, but it’s fuzzy. Bottom line, though, nobody was in the house when Mum fell out of the window. They told us she’d been killed instantly, but I didn’t believe them; I always wondered whether she could’ve been saved if she hadn’t been alone. I remember Mrs Merchant was the one to come and tell us.’

‘Peggy Merchant? The riding-school woman?’

‘Yes. She told us there’d been an accident at home and we needed to come with her.’

Sheridan looked at him sympathetically.

‘We thought she was bringing us back to March Manor. But she brought us to the riding school instead. We wanted to go home. Joe got very het up about it. The house was a crime scene, you see. We didn’t go back there for a few weeks. Dad took us to Dublin, then, to stay with family.’

‘A crime scene?’

‘They weren’t sure how she fell,’ explained Peter. ‘It had to be investigated.’

‘It must have been awful,’ said Sheridan.

‘Yes and no,’ said Peter. ‘I think we all blanked a lot of it out. That’s what I mean about it being a blur. But it was on the TV and radio. We heard the news. Dad hated it when they started talking about it. And then the papers – well, it was all over them too. I guess we were lucky that the tabloids weren’t as big a force back then. One of the regional papers ran a disgusting piece about the lord and lady of the manor, which was unbelievably offensive and implied that Dad had something to do with Mum’s death.’ Peter looked grim. ‘He sued them in the end. Got an apology. Gave the money to charity.’

Sheridan was startled. She’d assumed that Paudie had ploughed the money into his own businesses after bankrupting the paper.

‘When we were finally allowed back into the house,’ continued Peter, a hint of embarrassment in his voice, ‘I went looking for blood.’

‘What!’

‘On the ground outside the window. I think I couldn’t quite believe it had happened. I wanted real proof. I started raking the gravel, looking for bloodstained stones. Dad went nuts.’

‘I don’t blame him.’

‘He was furious when I came home and told him that someone at school had said Mum was murdered,’ said Peter. ‘He got us all together and said that some people, nasty people, wanted to believe that he’d had something to do with it. He explained that this was how the news worked. That people made guesses that weren’t true but wrote about them anyway.’

Sheridan looked uncomfortable.

‘I don’t mean you,’ he said. ‘I mean generally. That’s why he got into it, in the end. I think he thought he could make papers more . . . more . . . oh, I don’t know, ethical maybe?’

‘The
City Scope
was a very ethical paper to work for.’ Once again, Sheridan couldn’t help springing to the defence of her former employers.

‘Maybe that’s why he bought into it. Anyway, that was the start of him branching into media. And that’s what made him a bit more high profile for a time. His other businesses, the packaging companies, had always done well, but packaging isn’t as exciting as TV or radio. Nobody noticed him very much back then.’

‘I guess not.’

‘So that’s the story of Paudie O’Malley, my dad,’ said Peter. ‘It’s hardly going to launch you into a career of business journalism. Nor will rehashing Mum’s death do anything for you on the investigative side.’

‘I’m honoured you told me,’ said Sheridan. ‘And I’m sorry if I offended you all. I was thoughtless and insensitive.’

‘Nothing offends me,’ Peter told her cheerfully. ‘And no need to worry about the rest of the family. Eventually I managed to persuade Dad that the idea of you masquerading as a taxi driver was funny.’

‘I didn’t . . .’ Sheridan was going to say, once again, that she hadn’t masqueraded as a taxi driver. But her attention had been distracted by the woman who had just walked into the bar. Ritz Boland had left her ugly schnauzer at home. She was accompanied by a man instead.

And that man was Peter’s brother, Joe.

Joe saw Sheridan straight away. She was unmissable with her cloud of vibrant red hair framing her face, and his heart skipped a beat as she glanced in his direction. He wasn’t exactly sure why his heart should be skipping beats because of her. She wasn’t glamorous or elegant like Ritz. Nor was she model-thin like so many girls he’d dated – although that was a point in her favour, really, because Joe disliked excessively skinny women. She didn’t fawn over him, an occupational hazard he sometimes encountered when a woman he met realised he was part of the O’Malley family. Well, no chance of her fawning, he supposed, since Sheridan Gray despised everything to do with the O’Malley family, thanks to his father’s investment in the
City Scope
. When she’d told him how she felt, Joe had some sympathy for her point of view, but he couldn’t help thinking that she was being irrational about it. However, after she’d abandoned him in the restaurant, he’d conceded that he too would have harboured irrational feelings of anger and resentment if he’d lost his job in similar circumstances.

Perhaps, he thought, it would be good to go and speak to her. Clear the air between them. Perhaps even start again.
Surely it would be possible to put the whole job issue behind them? After all, it was partly thanks to his father’s support of the
Central News
that she had a job now!

But even as he was preparing what he might say to her, he felt Ritz Boland take his arm. He couldn’t abandon Ritz. And then he realised that there would be no point in abandoning her anyway. Because Sheridan Gray was sitting opposite his younger brother and smiling at something he’d just said.

‘Anyway, if all else fails, you can still become a taxi driver,’ Peter was telling Sheridan. ‘Is everything OK?’ he added, realising she wasn’t listening to him.

‘Oh, fine, fine.’ She turned to him and smiled. ‘Sorry, lost the thread of what you were saying. Or maybe it’s just that I can’t imagine myself as anything other than a journalist.’

‘Right.’ Peter looked at her curiously for a moment, but she was sipping her beer and her attention was fixed on the TV behind the bar, which was screening a Formula 1 race.

‘I’ve never gone out with a girl who was more into sports than me,’ he observed.

‘I thought you’d be interested in motor racing,’ she said, her eyes following the on-screen action.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘I just never imagined you’d be too.’

What the hell was Sheridan doing with his feckless brother? wondered Joe, as he watched them covertly. How on earth had she ended up in the bar with him?

Joe always called Peter feckless, even though he knew he was being unfair. But Peter’s life had been based on doing what he wanted when he wanted, and the rows that his
headstrong, self-centred nature caused had sometimes stressed Joe to breaking point. When he was in a forgiving mood, he put it all down to the trauma of the day their mother had died; to them being rushed to Peggy Merchant’s home and shielded from what had gone on, and Peter getting more and more upset about being dragged away from the party, where he’d been having a good time and had been the centre of attention doing magic tricks for his friends. He’d demanded to know why he had to stop, saying that he wasn’t leaving until she gave him a good reason. In fact they all wanted to know what was happening, but Peggy had simply said that their father would come and get them shortly and that they were to wait with her until then. Typically Peter had given in quite suddenly, shrugged his shoulders and said that he’d go if he could bring some birthday cake with him. Which had meant that Sharon Forbes, whose birthday it was, had to cut the cake before blowing out the candles. Joe had always felt sorry for Sharon, who’d had her birthday hijacked by his mother’s tragedy.

When they’d got to Peggy’s, Peter, Sinead and Cushla had gone to the stables with Peggy’s daughter, Tina, who’d taken their minds off things by asking them to help her groom the horses. Joe had told Peggy that he’d join them shortly, but as soon as she was distracted by an incoming phone call, he’d walked out of the house, through the fields and across the road until he was back home.

There was a lot of activity outside the house. An ambulance and two garda cars, their blue lights still flashing, were parked directly outside the front door. He could see his father standing on the steps, a garda beside him. There was a huddle of people around a shape on the ground. Joe felt the metallic
taste of fear in his mouth. He walked across the garden until one of the gardai saw him and stopped him.

‘He’s my son,’ said Paudie, when they tried to turn Joe away. ‘Leave him alone.’

‘What’s happened, Dad?’ Joe remembered how difficult it was for him to speak. It must have been equally difficult for Paudie to say anything, because he just kept shaking his head, his eyes unfocused. Then he reached out and pulled his son close to him. That frightened Joe more than anything, because Paudie wasn’t a demonstrative man. It had always been Elva who’d kissed them and hugged them and wiped away their tears. Paudie was gruff and dismissive and would tell them (the girls included) not to be crybabies. But he was crying now, Joe realised with shock. He could feel his father’s body shaking as he told him that Elva had had an accident.

The sequence of events after that was hazy in his mind, but he knew that his mother was dead. He’d known from the moment he’d seen the broken shape on the gravel that he was looking at a dead body.

The gardai spent a lot of time at the scene. They talked to Paudie and to the gardener, who’d turned up shortly after Elva’s body had been discovered. And they talked to Joe himself, although not until Paudie’s solicitor had arrived. Joe worried that Ger Ruane’s arrival meant his father thought he had something to do with Elva’s death, but Paudie said that he was only a kid and that he wasn’t going to let the guards mislead him into saying the wrong thing.

‘I’m not a child,’ Joe protested. ‘And there’s no right or wrong thing to say.’

He’d been mistaken about that. When it came to an
unexpected death, he realised that there was always a right and a wrong thing to say. The guards had questioned him about everything. About his mother’s state of mind. His father’s. The relationship between Elva and her children. How he personally got on with her. It had all been traumatising, and he realised then why Paudie had wanted the children kept at Peggy’s and out of the way of people who claimed to be sympathetic but who seemed to regard every word he spoke as a potential lie.

But they must have believed him, because in the end, Elva’s death was found to be misadventure, a tragic accident. The fact that she’d consumed alcohol that day was mentioned, but not as a contributing factor. And nothing at all was said about the monumental row that she and his father had had the previous night – the one in which Joe had heard her yelling at Paudie that one day she’d kill him, and Paudie retorting angrily, ‘Not if I kill you first.’

Joe had never told the police about the row. And he’d never told his father that he’d heard it either.