The Mystery of Mercy Close (42 page)

‘Nicolas lives there,’ Daisy called. ‘But he’s away for the weekend. He’s gone surfing in Sligo.’

I pressed the bell and ignored them.

‘He’ll be back tonight,’ Cain said. ‘Or maybe tomorrow. He’s our mate; he’s a good guy.’ That was code for: He buys blem from us.

No one was answering the door. I rang again.

‘We can get him to call you as soon as he’s back. We can get him to call you
now
.’

Still the door remained firmly closed. I had no faith in anything that pair of fantasists said, but it was pretty clear no one was at home at number five right now. I’d try again later.

‘Let us help you,’ Cain beseeched.

Deep in thought, I let myself back into Wayne’s. Between Friday and today I’d spoken to nine of his ten neighbours. I rewound quickly through every conversation. Had I missed any vibe? Was there anything a bit weird? A bit suspicious?

But I was forced to admit that there was nothing.

My phone made a sudden, plaintive, beeping noise, like a baby bird looking to be fed – it was almost out of battery! How had I let that happen? A panicky rummage through my very full handbag revealed that I didn’t have my charger with me; I must have left it in Mum and Dad’s. Schoolgirl Error! Quickly I gathered up my stuff and left Wayne’s and got into my car. I could
not
be without a working phone.

Just as I was driving out of Mercy Close, who did I see driving in? Only Walter Wolcott! Like a bullock in a beige raincoat, bent, with purpose, over his steering wheel, filling up most of the front of whatever car he was driving. Clearly he’d come to interview the neighbours. I almost laughed out loud. They’d make mincemeat of him. Especially the Active Agers. Any patience they’d had, they’d used up on me. And perhaps Cain and Daisy might do the same false imprisonment trick that they’d treated me to. I could but hope.

Wolcott was so focused on the task ahead that he didn’t notice me at all. Some private investigator.

I wondered again if he was the person who’d hit me. Did he have it in him?

Hard to know what age he was. Fifty-seven, perhaps. Or sixty-three. One of those sorts of ages. Fat. In a compact sort of way. I saw him once – do
not
ask me under what circumstances because I couldn’t possibly remember – but I saw him once at a function (could have been a wedding) and, entirely unexpectedly, he was quite a good dancer. Light on his feet for a heavyset bloke, steering some woman, who I presumed was his spouse, around the floor, in an old-fashioned, confident, almost skippy way.

A few minutes later my phone beeped with a text. Still driving, I picked it up and looked at it: the movement sensor at Wayne’s had been triggered. Wayne had come home! So much adrenaline rushed through me that I thought my head was going to lift off – then, as my heart sank like a stone, I realized it was probably Walter Wolcott.

I felt … violated. As if it was my own home he’d gone into.

With my dying phone I rang Jay Parker. ‘Does Walter Wolcott have a key to Wayne’s?’

‘John Joseph gave it to him.’

As if expressing its disgust, that was the moment my phone gave up the ghost.

Over at my parents, Mum had rounded up Margaret and Claire. After I’d found my charger and plugged in my phone, I accepted their shocked remarks about the bruised and cut state of my head, I let them bully me into having a shower and washing my hair, and I got Mum to write a cheque for Terry O’Dowd and put it in an envelope with a stamp.

‘Leitrim,’ she said in wonderment. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met someone from Leitrim. Have you, Claire?’

‘No.’

‘Have you, Margaret?’

‘No.’

‘Have you, Hel –’

‘No!’

‘I think you should go to A&E to have your head looked at,’ Margaret said.

‘To have her head examined?’ Claire said, and she snorted with laughter. ‘Much good that would do! So how’re you doing today, Helen? Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’

Riiiigght.

The last time I’d been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever
you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps:

The Let’s Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, ‘Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’

The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I’d have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, ‘What have you got to be depressed about?’

The It’s All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn’t kill myself because they’d miss me so much. More often than not, I’d end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, ‘Have you any idea how many people love you?’

The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn’t care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, ‘I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?’ Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender.

The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. those purveying alternative cures. And actually there were hundreds of them – urging me to do reiki, yoga, homeopathy, bible study, sufi dance, cold showers, meditation, EFT,
hypnotherapy, hydrotherapy, silent retreats, sweat lodges, felting, fasting, angel channelling or eating only blue food. Everyone had a story about something that had cured their auntie/boss/boyfriend/next-door neighbour. But my sister Rachel was the worst – she had me
plagued
. Not a day passed that she didn’t send me a link to some swizzer. Followed by a phone call ten minutes later to make sure I’d made an appointment. (And I was so desperate that I even gave plenty of them a go.) Most likely to say, ‘This man’s a miracle worker.’ Followed by: ‘That’s why he’s so expensive. Miracles don’t come cheap.’

There was often cross-pollination between the different groupings. Sometimes the Let’s Laugh It Off merchants teamed up with the Tough Love people to tell me that recovering from depression is ‘simply mind over matter’. You just
decide
you’re better. (The way you would if you had emphysema.)

Or an All About Me would ring a member of the Woo-Woo crew and sob and sob about how selfish I was being and the Woo-Woo crew person would agree because I had refused to cough up two grand for a sweat lodge in Wicklow.

Or one of the Runaways would tiptoe back for a sneaky look at me, then commandeer a Denier into launching a two-pronged attack, telling me how well I seemed. And actually that was the worst thing anyone could have done to me, because you can only sound like a self-pitying malingerer if you protest, ‘But I don’t feel well. I feel wretched beyond description.’

Not one person who loved me understood how I’d felt. They hadn’t a clue and I didn’t blame them, because, until it had happened to me, I hadn’t a clue either.

‘No, Claire, I’m grand,’ I said. ‘No mad urges to fling myself into the sea.’

While I waited for my phone to charge, I suddenly felt overcome with exhaustion. I couldn’t think of one productive thing I could be doing to find Wayne and I decided to just let go for a couple of hours. I texted Artie:

Have d kids gone out yet?

He replied within seconds:

Bella still here. Wil txt soon as shes gone.

In the meantime my parents’ house was full of newspapers and confectionery.

‘Will we have some biscuits?’ I suggested.

‘Get her some biscuits,’ Mum said to Margaret.

‘Chocolate ones,’ I called after her.

So we ate chocolate biscuits and leafed through acres of newspapers and much scorn was expressed over Zeezah’s ‘pregnancy’. No one believed it, not even Margaret, who was one of the most credulous people I’d ever met.

‘How could she be pregnant?’ Mum said. ‘When she’s a man? When she doesn’t even have a womb?’

‘Exactly!’ I said, although I was fairly sure that Zeezah
was
a woman.

‘And this tissue of lies!’ Mum held up the magazine that featured Frankie Delapp’s ‘At Home’. ‘That’s not his home; it’s a suite in the Merrion that everyone uses for these photo spreads. I’ve seen it … well, I couldn’t
tell
you how many times. Billy Ormond pretended it was his house. Amanda Taylor pretended it was hers. The number of times I’ve seen that “oak dinner table that seats twenty”.’

‘What about Wayne Diffney’s house?’ Margaret asked. ‘Is that a hotel?’

Mum took a look. ‘That’s real,’ she pronounced. ‘No hotel would be allowed to have such odd colours.’

God, it was really hard, verging on the
impossible
, to keep my mouth shut about how much I knew about Wayne’s house.

‘Peculiar looking place,’ Mum said, inspecting the pictures of Wayne’s beautiful, beautiful home. ‘Actually –’ she looked up at me, almost suspiciously – ‘it’s the sort of thing you’d like, Helen.’

‘Ah … is it?’

‘Wayne Diffney, he looks …’ Mum said, staring at the photos.

‘What?’

‘A gentle sort of a soul.’

‘Not
that
gentle,’ Claire said, from behind a magazine. ‘Remember him hitting Bono with the hurley that time?’

That’s
right
. I’d forgotten. It had been years ago but for a while Wayne Diffney had been a hero. For a short few weeks he’d been the people’s champion. Bono was such an iconic figure in Ireland that to
hit
him. On the
knee
. With a
hurley
. Well … it broke all sorts of taboos. Like flicking a red thong at the Pope.

I had to say, Wayne Diffney intrigued me. His house was decorated in individualistic, almost challenging colours. He didn’t buy milk. There was the assault on Bono, of course. And after his wife, Hailey, had run away, he’d gone after her and pitted himself, a little David, against the Goliaths of Bono and Shocko O’Shaughnessy, to try to win her back. (It hadn’t worked, but full marks for effort.) He was passionate, impulsive, romantic. At least he had been once and I was sure that all of that hadn’t been wiped away.

And when I thought about those books on his bedside table … Like, he had the
Koran
. Obviously lots of the intelligentsia read the Koran in an attempt to understand the mindset of towel-head suicide bombers. (And I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t have referred to them as towel-head suicide bombers. Although no one could ever have mistaken me for a member of the intelligentsia.)

And, of course, Wayne did do most of his work in countries where it would be handy to know about the seventy raisins in Paradise and that sort of thing …

My phone beeped, telling me it was fully charged. I picked it up and held it close to me. Perhaps I was a little too attached to it. Seconds later a text came from Artie:

Dere ALL gone out, ALL of dem. Come immediately!

I dithered for a moment; surely there was something I could be doing to find Wayne? But this opportunity with Artie was too rare and precious to waste.

‘Right!’ Quickly I gathered my things. ‘I’m off. Thanks for the biscuits.’

‘No flinging yourself into the sea,’ Claire chided cheerfully.

‘Hohoho,’ I replied.

He was waiting for me. He was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and as soon as I launched myself through the front door he stood up and took me in his arms and kissed me. I laced my fingers through the tangle of hair at the nape of his neck – I loved that part of him – then I slid one hand down the front of his body until it reached his groin. He was already rock hard.

‘Where are they?’ I asked.

‘Out.’ He was unzipping my jeans. ‘All out. Don’t talk about them. I want to forget they exist.’

‘When will they be back?’

‘Hours from now.’

‘I started undressing in the car. When I was stopped at a red light, I took my trainers and socks off so we could get my jeans off quicker.’

‘What a woman you are.’

I opened the button and zip of his jeans and slipped my hand under the waistband of his Calvins, then closed my palm around the baby-soft skin of his erection.

‘God,’ he groaned. ‘Do that again.’

‘No. You’ll have to wait.’

‘Oh, you’re cruel.’ He took my face in his hands, brushing my hair off my forehead, ready to kiss me again, then he froze. ‘Jesus Christ! What happened to you?’

‘Nothing. I mean, someone hit me, but I’m fine. Don’t stop.’

‘You don’t look fine.’ Already his erection was beginning to wilt.

‘It’s fine, Artie, I’m fine,’ I implored, dragging him upstairs,
towards his bedroom. ‘I swear to you, it looks worse than it is. We can talk about it later, just don’t stop. I’m taking my clothes off.’ At the top of the stairs I shimmied out of my jeans. ‘Look, Artie, I’m going to take my knickers off now.’

He had a thing about my bum, despite my scar from the long-ago dog bite. ‘It’s so round and cute,’ he often said.

‘But you’re injured,’ he said. ‘We can’t do this.’

I turned to him and took his face in my hands and said fiercely, ‘I’m telling you, Artie, if we stop now, I will
die
. I will kill you.’

‘Okay.’

We got to his bedroom, to his big white bed, and we tumbled on to it, savouring the freedom to be as noisy as we liked. I kicked off my knickers and let them fly across the room, then I whipped off my T-shirt and bra. Within seconds he was also naked and I pulled him to me, feeling the indescribable pleasure of his skin pressing against mine.

I couldn’t stay still. I wanted to feel all of him. I crawled on top of him so my stomach and chest were pushed up against his. If I could have climbed inside his skin, I would have.

‘The smell of you,’ I said. ‘It’s delicious.’ I pressed my face into his pubes, where his Artie-smell was most concentrated, and inhaled deeply, thinking: If you could bottle that …