The Final Silence (17 page)

Ida had always known what he was. That he had violence in his heart. She hadn’t known the full truth of it, the horror of his former self, until his tearful confession when they’d knelt and prayed that night a month before their wedding. The night he finally accepted Jesus Christ as his saviour. Maybe she should have run from him then, called the wedding off, braved the storm. But she was already two weeks late, Rea taking root inside her.

And he confessed his sins to Jesus. The Saviour had washed his soul clean. The Graham Carlisle who had done that awful thing had died, the new man was born in his place. They had held each other and cried.

Had that Graham, the old one, returned? Had he been hiding beneath the surface, watching, all these years?

She thought of the policewoman, Flanagan, and the card she’d left behind. The one Ida had taken from the kitchen bin, the two halves she’d hidden at the back of the cupboard.

She thought of the cold, hard black thing her husband kept locked in a safe in their bedroom.

Ida knew he kept it loaded.

FLANAGAN LEFT CALVIN
in the car, pulled on white forensic overalls in the hall. The light seemed harsh now, bleaching the colour from the walls and floor. The collection of bags and boxes had been removed for inspection, making the place feel emptier than it had in the afternoon.

Her footsteps resonated on the stairs, even with the muting effect of the overshoes. Each step had been painted white over bare wood, now discoloured with age. A waterfall of red had flowed down and dried to a dark muddy brown. An empty space where the body had been, yet somehow Flanagan still felt Rea’s presence, as if she haunted the air around the place where she’d died on the landing, her head hanging over the top step.

Flanagan disliked the term ‘victim’. It was too small a word when it came to murder. One could be the victim of a pickpocket or a computer hacker. But when a life was taken, the world needed a different kind of definition, not only for the person killed, but for those left behind. The devastation of it. She had known families destroyed by the killing of a loved one. Depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, even suicide. For every life taken, many more were obliterated by the fallout.

Seven or eight years ago, as a detective sergeant, Flanagan had investigated the murder of a man by a boy he fostered, who had beaten him to death in his own bedroom. Eighteen months after the sentencing of the boy, the dead man’s widow travelled to a beach on the Ards Peninsula, undressed, and walked into the sea. Her body was washed up on rocks days later. If Flanagan had her way, the boy she’d arrested and seen prosecuted for the man’s killing would have stood trial again for the wife’s murder.

Even through the face mask, Flanagan smelled the metallic, meaty odour of violent death. The atmosphere heavy with it. She climbed to the top of the stairway, careful where she put her feet, avoiding the red. At the top she had to hold onto the banister and swing one foot to the other side of the thickening pool, followed by the other.

Dark up here. She found the light switch, saw the spatter on the walls, turned her gaze towards the rear bedroom. The door had been forced. The blackness beyond as deep as a lake. She reached inside, searched the wall with her fingertips until she felt the switch through the thin membrane of the surgical glove.

The light filled every part of the room. The old desk at the centre, the noticeboard and the map on the wall. A chair and nothing else.

Flanagan entered.

Lennon had told her about the book. Rea’s parents had denied any knowledge. In spite of herself, she believed Lennon.

The desk had been salvaged from a school, by the look of it. The floorboards creaked as she crossed the room. She opened the drawer. Empty as she’d expected. She slipped her hand inside, felt the farthest corners, and underneath the desktop, searching for anything that might have been secreted there. Her fingers found nothing.

Hard to believe that a man had lived here until less than a fortnight ago and left so little of himself behind. And this room, so glaringly empty.

Flanagan imagined the book, this journal of the dead that Lennon spoke of. She pictured a man hunched at this desk, poring over the pages, reliving the horrific acts.

Could it be true?

True or not, the desire to be away from this place surged in on Flanagan. As she manoeuvred over the bloodstains once more, she felt an urge to apologise to Rea for her intrusion, as she always did at murder scenes. Someone had died here, alone, and now Flanagan invaded that place when it was too late to do the victim any good.

She left the overalls in the hall and found Calvin waiting for her at the garden gate, her mobile phone in his outstretched hand.

‘A message from Ladas Drive,’ he said. ‘Jack Lennon’s been trying to reach you. He wants you to call him back.’

Flanagan took the phone from him, saw that Calvin had already keyed in the number for her. All she had to do was press call.

She waited long enough to be sure she was about to be redirected to voicemail. Then he answered.

‘Yeah,’ he said, his voice sleep blurry.

‘This is Flanagan,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘DCI Serena Flanagan. You left a message for me.’

‘Oh,’ he said. She heard the sound of his lips smacking, trying to gather some moisture in his mouth. ‘Yeah,’ he said, fumbling his words, slow as they were. ‘I wanted to talk to you. To tell you something. I got a phone call.’

‘You’re drunk,’ Flanagan said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, yeah, I’ve had a couple of drinks, but I need to—’

‘Talk to me in the morning,’ she said. ‘When you’re sober.’

Flanagan hung up and put the phone in her pocket. She turned to Calvin who waited at the driver’s side of the car.

‘Take me back to Ladas Drive,’ she said.

Flanagan slipped into bed beside her husband at one in the morning, still wearing her work shirt. Alistair grumbled and pulled the duvet tight up under his chin and resumed snoring.

Exhausted when she arrived home, she had fixed herself a gin and tonic, Hendrick’s with cucumber, but found after a mouthful that she didn’t have the stomach for it. The ice rattled in the enamel sink as she poured it away.

They had bought the old farmhouse outside Moira twelve years ago, just before they married. It had taken eighteen months to renovate the place, she and Alistair doing much of the work themselves, learning the required skills as they went. Despite the stress of the project, she looked back on it now as the happiest time of her life. She a detective sergeant working her way through the ranks of the newly formed Police Service of Northern Ireland, and Alistair teaching history at a Lisburn secondary school. It took every penny they had, but they didn’t mind the sacrifice.

As Flanagan climbed the stairs, she remembered her husband sanding the banister, proud of the blisters and calluses he’d gained. His hair pure black, not washed through with grey as it was now.

Eli and Ruth lay still and silent in their beds. They were both young enough to insist on their bedroom doors being left open a crack, and Flanagan could stand in one spot on the landing, watching them sleep. Ruth with the ugly bear an aunt had given her four Christmases ago, Eli with his legs hanging out of the bed.

Flanagan feared for Ruth most of all. She had so many things to warn her daughter of, so many monsters lurking out there in the dark places. They kept her awake at night.

The bedroom she shared with her husband was a landscape of greys and blacks as Flanagan burrowed in close to his back. She hated to close her eyes in the dark. A terror that had stayed with her since she was around Ruth’s age, maybe younger.

She had gone into hospital for a small operation on her eyes – looking back, she wasn’t even sure what it was for – and had drifted to sleep with a needle in her arm and her mother’s soft words in her ears. When she emerged from the quicksand and tried to open her eyes, the world had remained blacker than any darkness she could remember.

She knew with complete certainty they had taken her eyes.

No one came when she screamed, not even when her voice cracked and gave in. She didn’t know how long passed before a nurse – she assumed it was a nurse – put a hand on her arm and told her everything was all right.

‘Where are my eyes?’ she asked.

The nurse laughed, told her not to be silly, it was just the gauze pads taped over them that made her blind, and they’d have to stay on a while yet. It took almost a full day of sobbing and begging for Flanagan’s mother to convince her the nurse had told the truth.

From all these years away, it seemed to Flanagan she’d come close to losing her mind in those hours. Now, for her, the dark would always have the taint of madness about it.

Flanagan shepherded her thoughts back to the present.

The book.

Lennon talked about it, though he said he hadn’t seen the volume. But now Flanagan knew that was at least something he wasn’t lying about. Rea Carlisle had been fixated on this book, whether it was real or not. Had she been in some sort of delusional state when she was killed? Book or not, delusion or not, that had no bearing on Lennon being the last to see her alive. It did not change his belief that his fingerprints would be on the murder weapon, the kind of evidence that convictions rested on. He was the obvious suspect, and every minute of Flanagan’s experience as a police officer told her that the most obvious answer to any question was almost always the correct one.

She thought of Ida Carlisle, lost in her grief. And Graham Carlisle, belligerent, as if his daughter’s killing was no more than a nuisance, that Flanagan’s investigation was somehow an imposition on him. She wondered if he was violent towards his wife. Ida had that quiet fear about her. It was clear he was mentally abusive, an idiot could spot that, but had he ever laid hands on the poor woman?

God help her, Flanagan thought.

She whispered a prayer of thanks for her husband’s goodness. Decent men were a rarity, of course, but more so in this part of the world. Flanagan’s father had not been one of them. He had been a drunkard. An abuser. A parasite who drained the life from Flanagan’s mother.

Thank God for Alistair, who had not complained when Flanagan kept her own name, who was glad to look after the children when work called her away, who was proud of his wife’s achievements.

She rested her lips against the back of his neck, felt the tickle of the soft hairs there, smelled the good shower gel the children bought him for his birthday.

Jack Lennon was not a good man, and Flanagan needed to know him better. She had heard whispers about him as soon as she’d set up her temporary office at Ladas Drive station. DCI Hewitt had only reinforced what she’d already been told. His colleagues obviously didn’t trust him, with the exception of CI Uprichard. DS Calvin had ferried stories to her, of how Lennon had helped out a loyalist thug with some traffic offences, how he had got embroiled in a bizarre feud that cost the life of his child’s mother, how he had driven a Ukrainian prostitute – a prostitute suspected of murder – to the airport so she could escape the country on a false passport which he had lifted from a crime scene. That Lennon had brought down a killer of at least five women in the process was incidental.

Men don’t attract trouble like that by sheer bad luck. Flanagan had learned this in her twenty years on the force. Back when she was in uniform, sweeping up the drunken louts from the city centre on Friday nights, she had observed the same bloodied faces week after week and known that trouble doesn’t go looking for anyone. So why did Jack Lennon lurch from one calamity to another? What kind of man was he?

She didn’t have long to find out. In less than two weeks, she’d have surgery, and then be away from work for God knows how long. Her case would be passed to someone else, someone who might not care so much about justice for Rea Carlisle. She’d be damned if she’d let that happen.

The surgery.

As fatigue began to outweigh Flanagan’s fear of the dark, she remembered the malignant lump in her breast. For the third time that day, with a knuckle between her teeth so she wouldn’t disturb Alistair, she sobbed with fear.

HE TOURED THE
city on foot, using the darkness as his cover. At night, he could go unseen by anyone that mattered. The only time he didn’t feel the eyes of others on him, real or imagined.

How this place had changed. As a young man, it had seemed to him no more than a large town, its industries dead or dying, its citizens turning on each other among the ruins. People so full of hate they couldn’t tell their true enemy was the poverty that should have united them. Instead they retreated to the worlds of Them and Us, put barricades between, and let the blood flow.

Now, though. Now it was a real city. Now Belfast glistened and glowed, even at this cold hour. The security barriers that had once closed off the city centre were long gone. A person could enter any of the shops without having their bags searched by a security guard.

He came to the City Hall, a grand palace of a building, more than a century old, its green copper dome towering above. Built when the city flowed with money from its industries, an ostentatious symbol of a wealth that would soon evaporate. Floodlights made it seem an apparition, a ghost of stone that would fade by the morning, as fleeting as the money that had built it.

Now the money had returned. Where men and women had once constructed ships or woven linen, their grandchildren now wrote computer programs or answered telephones in call centres.

New ways. Everything changes. Nothing remains. All will burn, eventually. Even him.

He should not have hurt Rea.

All he’d wanted was the photograph. Why had he allowed his rage to decide, to take control? He remembered feeling the crowbar connect with her head. The shock of it through his wrist, up into his elbow. Sending crackles of electricity through his body. And then he couldn’t stop. Even as his right mind told him no, go no further, you’ll risk everything. Still he continued, the fury making him raise his hand and bring it down again.