Those We Left Behind (3 page)

CIARAN WANTS TO
walk behind her, to follow, but she won’t allow it. When he slows his pace, she does too. Mr Lewis and Mr Gilpin stay back, their footsteps echoing on the shiny floors. Ciaran feels them there, like shadows trailing from his heels.

Once the probation woman has given her visitor’s card back to the front desk, once they’re outside in the cool air, once Mr Lewis and Mr Gilpin have been left behind, she stops walking.

Ciaran stops too, shifting the bag’s weight on his shoulder. He can’t look at her as she turns to him. He turns his head away, shy, wishing Thomas was here to tell him how to be.

Thomas always knows how to be. What to say. What to do.

‘Ciaran,’ she says, ‘I’m not going to lead you to my car. You are going to walk with me to my car. Beside me. All right?’

Ciaran’s stomach feels weird, like wriggly worms are eating him from inside. He looks back to the door he’s only just walked through. He wants to go back to where he knows how things work. But he can’t.

He feels all shaky frightened. Thomas would tell him to grow up, not to be a scaredy-cat, a cowardy-custard.

Thomas isn’t scared of anything. But Thomas isn’t here to keep the scared away.

‘All right?’ the woman asks.

Ciaran swallows, feels the pressure like little balloons in his ears, thinks of later on. Thinks of his brother. ‘All right,’ he says.

She nods. ‘Come on, then.’

She walks. He keeps pace with her, his gaze on the tarmac as they cross the car park. From the corner of his eye, he studies her. She isn’t tall, but she walks as if she is. She walks like she practises it, like how she walks matters a lot.

The breeze is strange on his skin. And the light. Ciaran can feel the light, as if he could split apart the colours, his skin knowing one from another. He is outside in the world, and he doesn’t know how to feel.

They approach a small car. The badge says Nissan. He can’t tell which model. He doesn’t know anything about cars. Thomas does. Thomas likes cars. Thomas has bought one. He told Ciaran two weeks ago. He promised to take Ciaran for a spin.

‘To the seaside?’ Ciaran had asked, hope bursting in him.

‘Maybe,’ Thomas had said, and Ciaran had gone all dizzy and floaty behind his eyes.

The probation woman digs in her handbag, cursing under her breath, until she finds a key. She presses a button. The car makes a mechanical clunk. She opens the boot, and he drops his bag inside.

‘Get in,’ she says, pointing to the passenger door.

Ciaran does as he’s told. He almost always does. He’s a good lad. All the guards say so. The dashboard presses against his knees. The car smells clean, but litter has been stuffed into the pockets and cubbyholes.

The woman lowers herself into the driver’s seat.

An important question occurs to Ciaran. ‘What do I call you?’ he asks.

‘My name,’ she says. ‘Paula.’

‘All right.’

She starts the engine, and the radio shouts all blaring loud before she reaches for the volume control.

Ciaran looks out of the passenger window, back towards the buildings he has left for the last time. He supposes he should feel something more, something big, as they drive away. Happiness, excitement, anything. But he doesn’t. Even as the car cuts along the tree-lined driveway towards the main gates, and all he can see is wood and the leaves going brown and yellow and orange, even then he feels nothing.

The gate to the main road comes into view.

And the men with cameras.

Paula says, ‘Shit.’

She slows the car to a stop.

Ciaran winds his fingers together in his lap. He sees the men gathering on the other side of the gateway, huddled in groups, chatting. Some of them smoking cigarettes. He remembers seeing men like them years ago, through the windows of the police van.

They notice the car. Just a few at first, but soon they’re all crowding towards the opening, pushing and shoving. Ciaran thinks of piglets fighting over their mother’s teats. He wants to laugh, but he holds it in.

‘It was supposed to be kept quiet,’ Paula says. ‘Someone must have tipped them off. They weren’t here when I came in. You can cover your face if you want. Maybe put your hood up.’

He raises the cardigan’s hood and drops his gaze to his hands.

The car moves off. The men swarm as it pauses in the gateway. Camera lenses clatter on the glass. Lightning fills the car. Ciaran gathers the fabric of the hood around his face, the flash-flash-flashing cutting through the weave.

Paula sounds the horn, inches the car forward, curses the photographers.

One of the men shouts Ciaran’s name. Asks if he has anything to say to the family of David Rolston.

That laugh is still pushing to escape him, making his lips all stretchy, swelling up inside his chest. He pinches the hood together to cover his mouth.

The car lurches forward onto the road. Paula accelerates hard, jerks the steering wheel, straightens their course.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ she says.

Ciaran says nothing. He fears if he opens his mouth the laughter will spill out of him, and she will think bad things about him. When the urge dissolves in his throat, he pulls the hood back and watches the road ahead.

Within a few minutes, they have passed through the avenues and crescents of semi-detached houses that Mr Lewis had called the Four Winds. That name put a picture in Ciaran’s head, of walls of air rushing through the streets, going north, south, east and west. It made this cluster of houses sound like somewhere strange and far away when really they were just ordinary homes for ordinary people. That had been a month ago, the last time Ciaran had been allowed to stay a night at the hostel. Mr Lewis had told him he could take a walk to the shops nearby if he wanted. Ciaran hadn’t dared.

The car halts at the junction with the big road with all its lanes of rush-rush noisy traffic. Ciaran looks up at the signs to see what the big road is called. He’s not sure he understands what they say. They say A55 and Outer Ring. Which is it? Both? He doesn’t like this junction, the cars coming from every direction, moving like bullets. A lorry rumbles past, and Ciaran feels the force of it through the soles of his shoes, through the carpet, and the car’s metalwork. He feels the displaced air rock the Nissan on its wheels. He wonders what it would feel like if the lorry hit them. The bang, the impact, the glass flying, he and Paula shaken inside the car like those dotty-red crawly ladybirds he’d trapped in a jar when he was little. Thomas had taken them from him, had shaken them hard to see if they would die.

He swallows and closes his eyes.

The car moves, the engine note rising in pitch.

When Ciaran opens his eyes again, they have crossed the junction. The big shopping centre passes on their right, the hostel on the corner to their left.

‘After we get you checked in,’ Paula says, ‘we’ll take a walk over. You can buy some things.’

‘What things?’

She shrugs as she flicks the indicator on to turn left. ‘I don’t know. What do you need?’

Ciaran thinks about it as they round the corner and she pulls the car up to the gate.

Two photographers point cameras from the footpath. They approach the car. Another man watches from across the road, a notepad and pen in his hands. The gate opens, and Paula drives through. She watches the men in her rear-view mirror.

Ciaran struggles to find a want for anything at all. But he will try very hard to think of something.

He places his bag on the single bed. The room is white and shiny clean, apart from the smears of grey above the heater and the little blue patches on the walls where someone had put up posters with that sticky stuff that isn’t Plasticine and taken them down again.

‘What do you think?’ Paula asks. ‘Will it do?’

She leans against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest.

‘It’s not the room I stayed in before,’ he says.

‘Probably someone else is in it. Is that a problem?’

Ciaran considers. He liked the room he had before. It was an odd shape. But this one will do. He says no, it isn’t a problem.

‘So you know the rules,’ Paula says. ‘Back here by nine every night. No alcohol. No drugs. They can search the room at any time. No visitors.’

No visitors? He feels those worms in his stomach again, wriggling, chewing on his insides. ‘What about my brother?’ he asks.

‘You can see him whenever you like,’ she says. ‘But not here.’

‘Can I call him? Can I see him today?’

‘Whenever you like. You can call him from the payphone downstairs. But why don’t we take a walk first? We can go shopping.’

Ciaran looks towards the window. He sees the blocky buildings of the shopping centre across the road, the cars streaming in and out.

‘What about those men? The photographers?’

‘They’ve got what they wanted. They’ll be gone by now.’

‘But I don’t need to buy anything.’

Paula smiles. She has very clean teeth. ‘A cup of tea, then. There’s a café at the Marks & Spencer’s. You could get a sandwich if you’re hungry. Did you have any lunch?’

His stomach growls, the worms chased away by her words.

FLANAGAN EXPECTED DCI
Thompson to be hostile. Instead, he appeared defeated.

She and DS Ballantine travelled to Ladas Drive station in east Belfast and found Thompson waiting in the canteen, nursing a cup of tea in the furthest corner, well away from eavesdroppers. Flanagan fetched a coffee from the counter and placed it on the table alongside the file full of Thompson’s unfinished business. Ballantine declined a cup.

DS Ballantine was a tall woman, Flanagan guessed late twenties, blonde hair, with an athletic build. Earnest and eager as Flanagan had been in her younger days, and just as full of ambition. She’d been told to take notes and keep her mouth shut, and had her pen ready as soon as she sat down.

‘I’m not out of here for a month yet,’ Thompson said, ‘and they’ve put me out of my office already. I’m having to share a desk with a bloody media officer. How the hell they think I’m going to be any good to anybody sitting there, I don’t know.’

Flanagan offered him as cheery a smile as she could muster. ‘Well, you’ve got your retirement to look forward to.’

A little more colour drained from Thompson’s grey face and his eyes grew distant.

‘Have you anything planned?’ she asked.

‘Mostly staying out of the wife’s way,’ he said. ‘Apart from that, a big long stretch of nothing. What are you, forty, forty-two?’

Flanagan cleared her throat, smiled, and said, ‘That’s a personal question. But I’ll be forty-six in a couple of months.’

‘How far into your contract are you?’

‘Almost eighteen years. But I’m not really counting.’

‘So you’ve got twelve years still to serve,’ Thompson said. ‘Like a prison term, isn’t it? A fucking life sentence. Murderers get less, for Christ’s sake. No chance of an early release for us unless you get shot or get your bloody legs blown off in some booby trap. And what about you?’

Ballantine seemed startled that a question had been sent in her direction. She blinked and looked to Flanagan.

‘What, you need permission to answer a question?’ Thompson asked. ‘So DCI Flanagan’s as hard as they say?’

‘I’m five years in,’ Ballantine said.

‘I see. Still fresh, then. Don’t worry, you’ll have the shit kicked out of you soon enough.’

Ballantine turned her gaze down to the blank page of her notebook, her face taking on a faint red glow of embarrassment.

Thompson turned his attention back to Flanagan. ‘You were on the Devine brothers case, weren’t you?’

‘That’s right,’ Flanagan said.

‘I hear he’s up for release. Makes you wonder why you bother, doesn’t it? Wee bastard like that, hardly inside long enough to get his coat off, and now they’re turning him loose. If it was up to me, scum like him and his brother would never see the light of day again.’

Flanagan did her best to keep a friendly tone. ‘Well, the courts have to keep emotion out of—’

‘We had a dog one time, a wee mutt, as pleasant a thing as you ever met. Then one day it bit our youngest on the face. He was lucky, he could’ve lost an eye, but he wound up with just a bit of a scar on his cheek. Anyway, the night it happened, I took that dog, and I put it in the boot of my car along with a towel soaked in chloroform. Came back the next morning, it was dead. You think that was cruel?’

Flanagan swallowed. ‘It’s not for me to—’

‘Yes, it was cruel,’ Thompson said. ‘But that dog never bit anyone again.’

Flanagan cleared her throat and asked, ‘Shall we crack on?’ She took her notebook from her bag, opened it to the list of questions she’d drawn up, hoping she could use them to sweep up the mess Thompson was leaving behind. Now she focused on the page to avoid looking at him.

‘Can we start with the Milligan assault?’ She opened the file to the first photocopied A4 sheet. ‘That was, what, nine months ago? Now, I’ve got a list of interviewed witnesses – all male – who were at the bar that night. Seventeen in total. Sixteen of them said they were in the toilets when the assault happened, and they saw nothing. The seventeenth, the barman, said he was in a stockroom. And it just so happened the CCTV was switched off that night.’

Thompson’s shoulders slumped. ‘That’s right. So?’

‘Well, there’s a floor plan of the bar in here. I believe the toilet is about ten feet by five, it has two urinals, one cubicle and a washbasin. You accepted the account of sixteen men who said they were all in there at the same time.’

‘You know where that bar is?’ Thompson asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you know what kind of street it’s on, the kind of area it’s in. I could walk up and down that street bare-bollock naked with my arse painted red and my hair on fire, and no one would see a bloody thing.’ Thompson smiled at his own imagery. ‘What, you think those witnesses would’ve suddenly remembered who put that poor bastard in intensive care if I’d just asked them a bit nicer?’

‘No, but I’ve questioned as many uncooperative witnesses as you have. There are ways and means, pressures to apply. I’d like to be sure you explored every possible avenue.’

Thompson’s smile dropped away, his eyes darkened. ‘Just who the fuck do you think you are?’

Flanagan opened her mouth to speak, but he slapped the table, rattling cups and cutlery. Ballantine flinched.

‘Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?’ Thompson said. ‘Accusing me.’

‘I’m not accusing you of any—’

He stood, his chair sliding into the wall with a clatter. People all around looked up from their sandwiches and drinks.

‘Thirty years,’ he said, his voice rising, his finger wagging at her. ‘Thirty fucking years I gave this bloody service. Now they’re done with me, they’re going to throw me away like a shitty rag. And now, here’s you.’

Flanagan placed her hands flat on the table, adopted as soothing a tone as she could manage. ‘Please, why don’t you just sit down and we can—’

‘Who are you? Tell me that. Who the fuck are you to come here and accuse me of not doing my job?’ His hands shook. His eyes red and watery. ‘I think of everything I gave up for this. All the abuse I got on the streets. All those mornings I crawled on my hands and knees in the frost and the rain, looking under my car to see if some bastard had put a bomb there. What for? You tell me, what for?’

Flanagan glanced around the room. Saw the other police officers look away. Ballantine stared at her notebook, her pen’s nib frozen half an inch from the paper.

‘Eighteen years, you said. If eighteen years isn’t enough to suck the will out of you, try thirty. See how you feel then. Tell me if you think it was worth it once your whole bloody life’s been wasted.’

Thompson stood by the table, breathing hard, his hands opening and closing. Flanagan held his hateful stare, refused to look away. She watched his anger burn out, leaving a shell of a man in front of her.

‘Christ,’ he said, his gaze flicking around the silent room, the florid colour washing away from his sagging cheeks. ‘Jesus Christ.’

He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, his palm across his mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, the words choking in his throat. He walked away.

Flanagan closed the file and put her notebook back in her bag as murmurs rippled around the canteen. Ballantine stowed away her notebook and pen, got to her feet.

‘Where are you going?’ Flanagan asked. ‘I haven’t finished my coffee.’

She lifted her cup, took a sip. She would not leave until the last drop was gone, no matter how hard they stared.