Sleep Sister: A page-turning novel of psychological suspense (20 page)

F
aye was
three months old when the information about Michael Hannon finally landed on Greg’s desk. The anonymous note contained a date and an address. In a plush hotel on the crest of a Portuguese mountain, Michael Hannon – whose maxim was ‘God Save Our Glorious Family’ – planned to engage in a discreet indiscretion with a female companion of long standing.

Greg was confident he knew the identity of the sender. Political destruction as compensation for domestic brutality. If the politician could not be nailed on a wife-beating accusation this would be just as effective. He showed the letter to Sue Lovett, his producer, who looked at it for only a moment before ordering him to pack his sunscreen – she was booking him on a flight to Portugal. Carol Wynne would accompany him.

‘Don’t worry, you can’t not go,’ said Eva, assuring him they would be fine on their own. Apart from the necessity of following the Hannon story to its conclusion, she suspected Greg would be relieved to escape for a short while from the domestic reality of a small baby. Night feeds, nappy changes, colic, windy smiles. Enchantment, chaos.

‘Marital bliss,’ murmured Carol Wynne when she joined them at the airport. ‘Who would be without it? Just wait till you’re a daddy of ten.’ She hitched her camera over her shoulder and they marched side by side through the departure gate.

Breakfast, Greg would later tell Eva, had been decided as the appropriate time for a doorstep exposure. Who could dispute the evidence of a pot of marmalade on the table?

In a quiet hotel on the summit of the Serra do Caramulo, Michael Hannon and his companion dined on chilled fruit and cheeses, cold meats and crusty bread rolls. Below them, emerging from the morning mist, a grove of lemon trees edged the terraced fields like black serrated knives. The woman was the first to notice Greg. She stretched out a hand to warn the politician but it hung motionless between them.

‘Is this your definition of family values, Mr Hannon?’ Greg, like the politician, had been known to milk a platitude or two when under duress. Lime-flavoured marmalade, he noted, as he thrust his microphone forward to catch a muffled curse, the crash of an overturned chair. It was over in minutes.

As he drove down the winding mountain roads and the countryside fell away into forests of olive trees and eucalyptus, he wondered if his heart was large enough to entertain pity for the shattered ambitions of Michael Hannon. He wanted to believe it was, yet he knew it was not. His mobile phone rang as he checked into Porto airport. Eva’s voice, calm with the numbness of grief, called him home.

F
aye’s death
was an inexplicable mystery. Three months old, her downy skin frozen when Eva leaned over the cot to lift her for her morning feed.

She touched her baby’s hands before they took her away, stroked the delicate skin between her fingers. She studied the veins on her eyelids, her spiky black eyelashes, the sweet curve of her mouth.

Greg wept bitter tears at the graveside. He begged Eva’s forgiveness, crying into her shoulder as they lay sleepless in bed. She said there was nothing to forgive. It wasn’t his fault. Or hers. No one was to blame. A cot death was an act of God. They still had each other, a future. Her words trailed into silence as they stared at each other across their daughter’s empty space.

For a fortnight after the funeral they stayed at Wind Fall. Greg brought Faye’s possessions to his wife. She gave them to the crèche in Ashton, keeping just a few mementoes that she wrapped in tissue paper. Days passed but she had no idea where time went. Liz made futile conversation, insisting that time would heal, insisting on understanding her pain.

‘How can you understand?’ Eva asked, refusing to allow her mother to condense such grief into a platitude. ‘You can’t compare a failed IVF procedure with my dead baby.’ She was amazed at her cruelty. Liz hated her in that instant. She saw it reflected in Eva’s eyes and, as her mother struggled to forgive, Eva loved her more intensely than ever. But she was caught in a bleak place and forgiveness could only come when she allowed herself to be absolved. She knew she would always remain her own judge and jury, condemned.

If only she had woken on time to feed her child. But she was tired. She slept on. If only the traffic had not been so heavy when the ambulance drove through the bottlenecks, its siren scattering cars too late. Her thoughts moved in a tight, unforgiving circle. It could have been different. It should have been different.

The tests came back from the hospital. All negative. A cot death was a riddle, the everlasting question. If only… If only… If only…

The paediatrician was willing to give them time. He seemed to believe they would draw comfort from knowledge. But what knowledge could be drawn from a mystery? Greg asked intelligent questions, as he always did in an interview situation. She could sense the paediatrician’s surprise and growing admiration. No doubt he was used to parents collapsing in a muddle of grief and incomprehension.

When they were leaving, he told Greg how much he admired him on
Elucidate
. How important it was to have people of his fine calibre who were courageous enough to expose the ugly underbelly of life. Eva imagined rotting vegetation being raked over, translucent maggots scrabbling for cover before her husband pinned them to the ground with his piercing questions. Her head was full of hideous images. The paediatrician said it was a natural reaction and would fade away when her hormone balance settled back to normal. She asked him to define ‘normal’. Greg frowned and held her arm as they walked away.

Liz, gazing at the bereft faces of her daughter and son-in-law, suggested they take a short holiday.

‘You need time to find each other again,’ she said as she waved them off. She was right. They had many things to discuss.

Greg’s big opportunity had arrived. Since the Michael Hannon exposé his star had risen. Politicians, it seemed, erred everywhere, especially in New York, and the producer of
Stateside Review
, a prestigious US current-affairs programme, was headhunting him. A two-year contract was offered, linked to a salary that drew a whistle of astonishment from him.

He tried to discuss this new opportunity with Eva. It was a chance to begin their marriage anew in a ghost-free environment. But she found it impossible to visualise a future when the past held her captive and the present was a time that had to be endured.

T
hey drove
to Kerry on a rainy afternoon. Annie Loughrey had offered them her cottage while she was touring with her band. Loughrey’s Crew was a seasoned group of musicians who lived in Dingle but was equally at home in the clubs and Irish pubs of New York.

The Dingle peninsula was quiet. The hedgerows, usually bowed with the weight of wild fuchsia, had not yet begun to green. They walked by the harbour and drove through the Connor Pass. They ate in candlelit restaurants and drank Guinness in pubs where a few locals gave them cursory glances before ignoring them. At night they made love with a rough, unthinking haste, as if the anonymity of a strange cottage gave them a freedom they no longer possessed in places where Faye had once rested her head.

Loughrey’s Crew arrived back at the end of the week. The band was playing in one of the local pubs and Annie persuaded them to come along. Her fiddle trilled in welcome when they entered. As giddy as a poodle on speed, that was how Liz described her youngest sister: single, carefree, in love with the music and the young men who played it with her. After she finished her set she came down and embraced them.

‘Stay on,’ she urged. ‘We’re having a session after hours. That’s when the fun really begins.’

Greg listened to the musicians, his face growing more clenched as the night wore on. Usually he was a cautious drinker, too self-contained to enter the realms of the indiscreet, and Eva grew nervous as he continued to drink with grim concentration.

When the session was over they left the pub and walked along the harbour. In the grey Atlantic swell a friendly dolphin rested his bones, waiting for summer when he would begin his high-diving performances, pursued by sonar boats and screaming children.

Greg’s voice was slurred when he pressed his face into her neck. He sobbed and asked her to forgive him.

‘You heard the doctor. There was nothing either of us could have done.’ Eva stroked his face. His skin was cold, his high cheekbones raw and red from the wind. ‘You have to stop tormenting yourself.’

‘I could have phoned you – if I’d rung you’d have woken up and realised something was wrong with Faye. It might not have been too late – but I couldn’t ring you… Not then…’

For the first time since their child’s death she heard a deeper resonance in the words he uttered. His repentance was not just the grief of a stricken father. It demanded a greater absolution.

‘What stopped you ringing me?’ she asked.

‘Guilt…’ Guilt was tearing at the heart of his marriage. The truth shivered and broke between them. Many miles away on a mountain in Portugal, a world apart from her grief, her husband had triumphantly brought a politician to his knees – and then betrayed her.

Aerobics on a mattress. That was his description. Unexpected yet inevitable from the moment Carol came into his room with a bottle of vodka and they began to talk about old times. Nights when they had bunkered down on the edge of breaking a story, the intimacy of sharing anonymous hotel rooms in cities where they were strangers, walking free. Laden memories, stirring an unexpected, responsive desire as he’d pulled her close, her mouth opening, seeking him, their excitement heightened by the knowledge that Michael Hannon was enjoying the same swamping passion on the floor above them, unaware that retribution would come with the dawn.

Why do men insist on confession? Later, in the numbed aftermath of everything, Eva would ask herself this question. She had no desire to be the wife who was the last to know. She didn’t want to know at all. Indiscretions could be absolved by time and silence. Guilt, on the other hand, was a heavier burden. Those who weren’t strong in their resolve to keep their secrets had a need to share this guilt, to cast it off through the seeking of absolution. In a previous era Greg would have breathed his sins into the ear of a weary priest. He would have received a rosary as penance, recited slowly and with feeling. Eva would have received flowers and attention, perhaps even a fur coat, depending on the nature of the indiscretion, and worn it proudly because in the good old days it was not considered necessary to empathise with the suffering of skinned animals. Instead, she – wife, priest, psychologist, deceived – she got the truth.

W
hen a problem was insurmountable
, Brigid Loughrey never wasted energy trying to solve it. She was a shadow of her former self when she was admitted to the hospice to live out her final weeks.

‘Morphine… So much more effective than weed,’ she murmured, a smile playing around her dry lips when Eva visited the small, private ward. Her gaunt features looked peaceful as she drifted in and out of sleep. The previous night she and Liz had looked over old photographs and the box holding them was on her bedside locker. She gestured towards them. ‘So many sweet memories,’ she said. ‘You were such a precious gift.’

‘That’s how I used to imagine myself,’ Eva said. ‘Wrapped in fancy paper and delivered to the door. What
really
happened to me, Gran?’ This moment wasn’t planned and Eva didn’t realise that the subconscious is a treacherous force, at its most subversive when it appears to be quiescent.

‘You were the Anaskeagh Baby,’ Brigid whispered.

‘Anaskeagh?’ Eva remembered the town, the wide main street with its old-fashioned shops alongside the brash modern chains and new town houses, all overshadowed by the headland. ‘Is that where I was born?’

‘You were born on Anaskeagh Head but you belong to us.’ Her voice, hoarse and shaky, was barely audible. Her breathing deepened and her eyes closed as she drifted away from Eva’s questions. She awoke a short while later and sucked weakly on the moist lollipop sponge Eva held to her lips.

‘Was I born on a farm, Gran? Why was I called the Anaskeagh Baby? Do you know my mother’s name?’ It seemed cruel to demand the truth from a dying woman, but Eva wanted a beginning to her story and Brigid Loughrey, high on morphine and the adrenaline of approaching death, replied, ‘No one knows her name, Eva. She gave birth to you all alone in that lonely place, God help her. No more questions, now. I’m so tired. All that’s left for me to do is follow the fairy child.’

‘When you meet her, tell her I love her more than my own life.’ Eva’s tears soaked her cheeks. She allowed them to fall unchecked. She didn’t feel courageous. She didn’t feel angry. Twenty-six was too old to have an identity crisis. She kissed her grandmother’s withered lips and sat silently beside her until the elderly woman drifted back to sleep and Annie arrived to take over the next shift.

Brigid died two days later. She had cast a faint but troubling light on a dark journey that had begun on a rock-strewn headland and, on the morning after her funeral, Eva strode through the black wrought-iron gates of the National Library. In the hushed hall, where fat-bellied angels on the ceiling stared impassively down on the rows of silent people scanning microfilm and old books, she sought her roots.

She steadied the viewfinder and focused on headlines. Her past did not take long to swim into view. ‘
Gardaí Plea to Mother of Anaskeagh Baby
.’ ‘
Anaskeagh Baby off Critical List
.
’ ‘
A
naskeagh Baby in Care
.
’ ‘
Still No Sign of Mother of Anaskeagh Baby
.
’

The young man seated at the reading table had brown hair tied in a ponytail. Eva thought he was a woman until she noticed his chin. Long and narrow, with a ridged bone jutting it forward, dark stubble. He reminded her of Greg. When he glanced over, her expression terrified him back into the fixed study of some ancient volume. An older women sat next to him, writing feverishly with a silver pen. Porters in uniforms loitered by the main information desk, chatting quietly. How many people had sat in this building, outwardly calm, while their past was enlarged on microfilm before their eyes? Did they, like her, want to scatter headlines in front of the hushed readers. To shout, ‘Look – look – that’s me!’ To breathe slowly until the trembling ceased.

Was it Andy Warhol who said that everyone has fifteen minutes of fame? she wondered. Eva had had more than her average, being two weeks old before she was out of the public gaze. Journalists had had a field day, accusing the Irish nation of collective guilt. Old chestnuts pulled from the fire, still roasting. The irresponsibility of men who shagged and shied away from the consequences. Even the clergy were in on the act, writing about the need for charity, for soft hearts and open minds. Adopted women spoke about their mother searches and psychologists shaped the mind frame of Eva’s birth mother, writing knowledgeably about her desperation, her pain.

The inhabitants of Anaskeagh bolted their doors. They drew up the drawbridge, refusing to comment on the reasons why their lack of charity and understanding had resulted in such a heinous act taking place on their doorstep. As Anaskeagh Head was an isolated headland, jutting into a raucous Atlantic, it seemed an unfair accusation, but then the whole country seemed convulsed by her mother’s anguish. It was left to a county councillor to speak for the local population. They were heartbroken, said Albert Grant, by the plight of this unfortunate woman. Eva recognised him from the interview he’d given after Frank O’Donovan’s funeral. He was older now, silver-haired and elegantly dressed. In those days he had a more belligerent image, his hair shorter, darker, his full-lipped mouth clenched, as if he was tired of answering questions. Had his people known this unfortunate woman’s identity she would have received their full support, he said. They were a caring community and were being unjustly held responsible for a tragedy outside their control. Somehow Eva was lost in this forest of comment and opinion. She was simply ‘The Anaskeagh Baby’. The catalyst. Then it all stopped. No more intriguing glimpses into her life. No sudden mother–daughter reunion.

Eva sat back and flexed her shoulders. She switched off the machine and left that monument to tall tales and forgotten history. Did she hate this faceless woman who had given birth to her? If she did, it was a hatred without passion. Did she understand her desperation as she struggled to hide her shame from a righteous society waiting to condemn? Could she forgive her for wrapping her newborn daughter in a sack and leaving her on the doorstep of a hill farmer? Eva didn’t understand such actions. But neither did she hate or pity or condemn. She felt nothing but a growing awareness, questions answered, many questions still to be asked.