Ninemile House Read online

  “Quinn!” Derry blurted. “Oh, please, please, let me go.”

  “Now just hold on a second,” the guard tried to calm her down. “The family are all right. No one’s been hurt or anything like that.”

  “Oh, thank God, thank God,” Derry sent up a prayer of thanks, but her legs still trembled so badly, it was a miracle she didn’t collapse onto the ground. “So, what is it then? What are all those people doing outside my house?”

  Reddening, the policeman huffed a bit and cleared his throat. “To be honest with you, I don’t know all the details, but there seems to be some sort of political scandal. Bribery and corruption, were mentioned I believe.”

  “Bribery and corruption?” Relief making her almost hysterical, Derry’s voice screeched into the high octaves. “What do you mean bribery and corruption?” Craning her neck to look over his shoulder, Derry caught a flash of red and suddenly it all started to make a horrible kind of sense. Sinead, flanked by the Slug, were holding court to a bevy of newsmen, the Slug swelling visibly beneath all the attention. This then was his great scoop, the reason for all the barbed comments and hostility and nothing whatsoever to do with Gabby, as she’d mistakenly thought. Together he and Sinead had conspired to destroy James and by destroying James, destroy her too. The woman scorned and the broken down hack – a deadly combination.

  But James was one hundred percent innocent of any charge of corruption, Derry was sure of that. She had heard him rail often enough about corruption in the ranks. Besides, his career meant everything to him, far too much for him ever to put it on the line. And then a terrible trickle ran down Derry’s neck, a shiver like someone walking over her grave. Not twenty-four hours since, wouldn’t she have said exactly the same thing about her marriage? And yet, James had cheated on her, and put his marriage on the line, the wife and children who meant so much to him.

  The guard released her arm, and, no longer in quite such a hurry, she walked slowly, zombie-like past him.

  “Derry! Derry!” Turning, one of the reporters suddenly caught sight of her and, suddenly, like a swarm of bees, they decamped from the doorstep and surrounded her in one heaving mass. A microphone was pushed roughly in her face. From all around came the frantic sound of cameras clicking, freezing her horrified expression for time immemorial.

  “Derry! Derry Quinn, what have you to say with regard to the allegation that your husband was involved in fraudulent activities?”

  “Is it true your husband took financial kickbacks in return for granting tenders in the Dublin Docklands development?”

  “Is there any substance in the rumour that Mick Roberts was granted the tender over the whole of the South East Docklands area in return for an undisclosed, but believed to be six-figure, sum? What have you got to say about that?”

  “Is it a fact that you and your husband have benefited from free holidays and luxury cars. Did you both, in fact, receive his ‘n hers Rolex watches from Mr Roberts?”

  Click! Click! Click! Flash! Flash! Flash! In vain, Derry tried to fend them off, lashing out ineffectually, her head reeling beneath all the accusations and questions.

  “Derry!” A familiar voice slashed through the cordon and, blessedly, Sheila was standing there a power hose held in her hand, which she was using to stunning effect. Soaking the journalists nearest to Derry, she reached in with her free hand and dragged her across to her own house, drenching everyone who got in their way, innocent bystander or not. Slamming the front door behind them, she snapped on all the locks and drove the deadbolt home.

  “Bastards! You poor thing, what a homecoming.”

  Shocked and bewildered beyond measure, Derry went and sank down on the bottom step of the stairs.

  “God, Sheila, what’s going on? What is it all about?”

  Sheila frowned. “You mean you didn’t hear anything? Good lord, it’s been all over the news this morning. I tried to phone you on your mobile, but there was no reply and the receptionist at the hotel said you had already left.”

  “The battery died, and I had so much on my mind, I didn’t put the radio on in the car like I usually do.” Rocking backwards and forwards, Derry wrapped her arms around her knees, almost as if she was wrapping herself in a protective package. “So, tell me, what exactly is going on?”

  “Okay, but let’s go into the kitchen,” Sheila suggested, “and I’ll make us a nice cup of tea. It’s supposed to be good for shock and I could use one myself, if the truth be told.” Gently she raised Derry to her feet and led her through to the kitchen where she’d had the presence of mind to draw the blinds, not taking any chances that some of those riff-raff reporters outside wouldn’t leg it over the garden fence or turn their long range lenses on the house, on the off-chance of getting an exclusive.

  As Sheila bustled about making a cafetiere of strong coffee and putting out a plate of biscuits, Derry sat shaking at the table, wondering not for the first time recently how things could have gone so wrong in such a short space of time. It was times like this that made you realise that you really were just a very small cog in the universe and when the fates conspired against you, there was really very little you could, except sit back and weather the storm as best you could.

  “Tell me, Sheila,” she said, as the other woman poured a large mug of coffee and placed it in front of her. “Tell me everything, you know.”

  “Which isn’t an awful lot,” Sheila admitted, taking the chair opposite. “The first I knew of it was a terrible commotion outside the bedroom window this morning and when I looked out there were all these TV vans and reporters drawing up outside your house. Billy went out to see what it was all about and came back saying it was all over the news that James had been involved in some sort of dirty dealings with that Mick Roberts.”

  Mick Roberts! Mick bloody Roberts! Derry hung her head. Only a few months ago, she’d hardly heard of him and now it seemed like he was at the back of all sorts of misfortunes concerning her family. Hatred rose up in her like bile. “He’s not Mick Roberts, Sheila. His real name is Michael Kinnane.”

  “What?” Sheila’s hands flew to her face. “What are you talking about, Derry. Have you gone mad or something?”

  Slowly, deliberately, Derry shook her head. “Not mad, no, Sheila. I have proof.” Cradling the mug between her palms, she let the heat soak in, comforting. “That’s why I went down to Cork, to investigate. Remember I told you about Gabby’s reactions when she saw Mick Roberts on the TV the night of the political broadcast? And remember I mentioned to you that he asked me where I’d been born and when I said Sunday’s Well, he looked all upset and peculiar. Well, that’s when I started to put two and two together and I was right. Mick Roberts and Michael Kinnane are one and the same person.” Derry’s eyes hardened to pieces of granite. “And according to my mother Michael Kinnane was the father of poor Gabby’s baby and now it looks as though he’s busy destroying James too.”

  “But the name?” Sheila frowned.

  Derry made a sound of disgust. “No great mystery there. His mother’s surname was Roberts.” She told her about the graves in Sunday’s Well, the contrast between the mother’s and the father’s, the alleged scandal all those years before that resulted in Michael taking off into the wide blue yonder, his mother’s subsequent suicide and his father drinking himself to death. Derry took a sip from her coffee, didn’t even taste it. “Of course nobody knows what the scandal was for sure, though the widely held belief seems to be that it was to do with him getting some young girl pregnant.” She frowned. “And you know who my money is on, don’t you?”

  Sheila felt sick. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Her hands began to shake so badly, that coffee slopped out of her cup and onto the table. “If that’s the case, Derry, then there’s even more to it than you think. Maybe we should have something a bit stronger to drink.” She half-rose from the table, but Derry waved her back down, feeling she might scream under the weight of any more revelations, but needing to know the worst nevertheless.

 
“No, Sheila. If there’s something I need to know, spit it out. For God’s sake, don’t leave me in ignorance.”

  “I’d no intention of leaving you in ignorance,” Sheila confessed. She waved a hand towards the window. “But I wasn’t reckoning on all this breaking loose. It seems unfair to burden you with even more.”

  Wearily, Derry passed a hand over her eyes. “Oh, look, just out with it. It’s not as if I’m going to shoot the messenger.”

  “All right, then.” With a deep sigh, Sheila began. “It happened yesterday evening, when I went over to your house just to check that Gabby was getting on okay with putting the twins to bed. You know how they can get a bit stroppy . . . ”

  ***

  “Ah, they’re fine,” Gabby told her, “I’ve just put them to bed ten minutes ago and the little angels are already out like lights.”

  “Well that’s, great, fair play to you!” Sheila followed her through to the living room where, as usual, the TV was on. It had become something of a standing joke that it hadn’t taken Gabby long to turn into a telly addict. “I’d no doubt you could manage anyway. What are you watching?” She nodded towards the TV.

  “There’s some film just about to start. Why don’t you stay and watch it with me for a bit?”

  “Well, as I suppose I’ve nothing better to be doing… ” Sheila plumped down next to her on the settee, amused by the way Gabby was already glued to the screen, sitting slightly forward in case she missed anything. As both subsided into silence, the first scene opened on a dark alleyway, the wet ground eerily lit by a wan moon, dark, ugly buildings crouched on either side as though ready to spring on some unsuspecting passers-by. Unseen, a woman was walking toward them. They could hear the steady tap-tap-tap of her high-heel shoes. Sheila, an aficionado of horror movies, grinned, as beside her, Gabby tensed. Good, she was really getting into it. The tapping grew steadily quicker and a split second later the woman burst onto the screen at a run, her long hair flying out behind her, face frozen with fear, mouth open in a silent scream. And then a hand appeared on her shoulder, she was jerked back and suddenly she was on the ground, a hulking great man towering over her. Swiftly the camera panned to where one of her stilettos lay on its side pointing back in the direction from where she’d come. There was a ripping sound and back it panned. The woman, her blouse in tatters, her skirt ruched high up on her thighs, lay on her back struggling helplessly with her attacker. A bead of blood, a shocking vivid scarlet against the otherwise film noir palette, appeared at the corner of her mouth and ran down her chin in a slow trickle. And that’s when Gabby jumped up from the settee and began to scream and scream and scream.

  “Good heavens, Gabby!” Jumping up herself, Sheila tried desperately to soothe her before the nose woke the twins and brought out the National Guard. Thank God, James was out somewhere. “It’s only a film. It isn’t real for God’s sake. That woman’s laughing all the way to the bank. She’s an actress. Do you understand? She’s only acting.”

  But Gabby seemingly had been transported to a world of her own. She didn’t appear to hear Sheila, or even to register her. Glassy eyed, she was looking way beyond into the middle distance, fixated in horror on something only she could see. Backing step by step into a corner, she hit the wall behind and slid slowly down, curling into a foetal position at the base,

  “No! Get away from me! Don’t touch me! Leave me alone. Oh, please. Oh, please.” As Gabby struggled with an invisible attacker, her voice altered to that of a little girl, terrified beyond measure, pleading for her life and suddenly, all the pieces fitted into a shape which made Sheila gasp with shock.

  Her heart suddenly pounding, a whooshing noise filling her head and ears and muffling her voice so that it too sounded totally unfamiliar, as though it belonged to someone else, she took a tentative step forward. “Oh, Jesus, Gabby, I see it now. You were raped, weren’t you? All those years ago, some bastard raped you. And you, you poor little thing, paid a terrible price.” In pain for the innocent child Gabby had been and the broken woman she was now, Sheila hurried over, and hunkering down drew her gently into her arms, trying desperately to imbue her with some of her own strength till finally, the shaking stopped.

  ***

  “Raped?” Anguished, Derry stared at Sheila. “Are you sure?”

  Sheila nodded. “Sadly, yes. It wasn’t a teenage fling that got your sister pregnant, Derry. She was raped. Some bastard raped her.”

  Derry’s nerves were strung so tightly, she felt like they might snap at any minute. “Not just some bastard, Sheila. Michael Kinnane. Mick Roberts, as he now is.”

  “Oh, just wait a minute, now.” Sheila, warded her off. “We can’t be sure of that. She wouldn’t name names. All I can say is that whoever he was, he did such a good job of putting the fear of God into her, that she’s carried that secret inside her for the last thirty years.”

  “Of course, it’s Michael Kinnane!” Derry snapped. “Don’t you see how it all fits together? She used her fingers as an abacus, ticking off the sequence of events, as she imagined them, one by one. First, he rapes Gabby and somehow he either confesses to his old man or his old man gets wind of it. There’s a colossal row and Michael ends up either being booted out of the house or doing a runner. The mother either overhears the pair of them going at it hammer and tongs or finds out in some other way. The marriage breaks down under the strain of it all, she leaves and ends up committing suicide, unable to come to terms with the fact that the apple of her eye is a low-down filthy rapist and the scum of the earth! A few years later, the father, presumably for the same reasons, ends up drinking himself to death.” Derry’s voice faltered. “And in the meantime, instead of tea, sympathy and counselling, poor Gabby is pilloried and reviled by her own mother and father, and shipped off to a life of servitude in the convent. And there, to add insult to injury, she gives birth to a little bastard, fathered by a big bastard.” Tears hovered on the corners of her eyes, tipped over and spilled down her cheeks. “Oh, Sheila, I should have guessed. Why didn’t I guess? All the clues were there. So much for being an investigative journalist! What a laugh! If only I had put two and two together: the terrible nightmares, her reaction to Mick Roberts that night on the TV, her complete lack of interest in Mary’s baby that day I took her to visit Frisco, her pretence that she had never ridden before. She wanted to blot out the stud farm completely from her mind. I see that now.” Furious with herself, she knuckled at her eyes. “And then, as if she hadn’t suffered sufficiently, as if having thirty years of shit being chucked at her left, right and centre wasn’t enough, I had to go digging around, trying to find her son, the walking, talking embodiment of her rape, fondly imagining I was playing Mother Therese. No wonder she flipped.” Bitter, Derry’s mouth twisted. “Why didn’t I just nail her up on a cross and have done with it. It would have been kinder.”

  “Oh, stop that!” Sheila slammed her hand down on the table. “Get down from your own cross, Derry. This isn’t about you. You weren’t to know. How could you? Besides, the child, God help him, is as innocent as Gabby. The question, as I see it is, if Michael Kinnane aka Mick Roberts is, indeed, the one who raped Gabby, what are you going to do about it? Call the police?”

  “Tah!” Derry made a sound of disgust. “As if, and give him the opportunity to buy or smooth-talk his way out of it. The man is obviously a master of reinvention. Look how he reinvented himself from rapist, Michael Kinnane, to respectable hot-shot property developer, Mick Roberts. Oh no,” Derry shook her head, her eyes hard as glass. “I’ll deal with this in my own way. I’m going to kill the son of a bitch. I’m going to make him pay for all those lives he destroyed. His mother’s, his father’s, Gabby’s, the child’s and now James’s and, by association, mine and the twins’. By the time I’m finished with Michael Kinnane, he’ll wish he’d never been born.”

  CHAPTER 22

  It didn’t take Derry long to divine that James was innocent of all the allegations made against him. To anyone who knew him
well, his obvious shock and distress were proof enough. Over the course of an investigation that was to last for several months, she saw him age ten years, lost a stone in weight and noticed a peppering of fine grey hairs spring up amongst the blond.

  “The truth will come out, Derry. I’ve done nothing wrong,” he insisted, when finally she arrived home from Sheila’s house, the rage of learning about Gabby’s rape, lending her the impetus to knock intrusive reporters out of her way as easy as bowling ninepins.

  “But Mick Roberts did get the tender, didn’t he?” Derry had to force herself not to spit the name out. She longed to tell him about the rape, only now wasn’t the time. James had enough problems of his own. Besides she wasn’t at all sure that he’d believe her. Where was her evidence? Her hard proof? He’d probably say that emotion was clouding her judgment. Oh, sure there were coincidences all right but on the whole, wasn’t it mainly a lot of conjecture, a lot of trimming the corners off square pegs? Gabby hadn’t come right out and confessed to Sheila. She hadn’t pointed the finger, named and shamed. And, as an investigative journalist, Derry would normally have had her feet firmly in James’ camp. Her training dictated that she dealt only in facts. In this particular case, however, she was Gabby’s sister first and an investigative journalist after that and all her instincts were screaming that Mick Roberts, the erstwhile Michael Kinnane had raped her sister and condemned her to a life of misery.