Ninemile House Page 23

  “Red then,” he smiled and waved her into a comfortably battered looking leather armchair. Derry watched as he busied himself opening the wine, decanting it into two long stemmed crystal glasses. His movements were spare, economic, assured. His face, half in shadow as he bent over the table, intent and slightly grave. A pulse, the only outward sign of his unease, twitched in his cheek. He had the kind of classic features that would wear well, right into old age and didn’t look anything like what one would imagine a rapist to look like. But then she had always been surprised at how ordinary, non-descript even, most rapists and murders looked. Somehow one felt they ought to have horns or be branded in some way that would mark them out from the rest of society. That, of course, was just sheer nonsense. Rapists came in all shapes and sizes and covered all social spheres. There was no such thing as one size fits all.

  Derry clicked her handbag open, felt inside for the gun, hoping that when the time came she wouldn’t falter. Its solid coolness calmed her nerves.

  “Slainte!” Your health! Taking the seat opposite, Mick raised his glass in the Irish toast.

  “Slainte go foill!” Good health forever. Derry made the automatic response. How ironic that good health was the last thing she wished him.

  “And now - Derry. May I call you, Derry? What can I do for you.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I take it there is some purpose to your visit here, not that you’re not welcome to pop in any time you like, but . . .”

  Derry swallowed rapidly. “Now that the moment had come to confront him, she wasn’t quite sure where to start. She took a long swallow of her drink, feeling her throat almost close up. But then a vision of the fifteen-year-old helpless Theresa rose up in her mind and she knew she would do whatever it took to make him confess.

  ***

  The house was in darkness as James let himself in the door. Switching on the hall light, he dropped his briefcase on the floor and shrugged off his jacket, leaving it untidily draped over the bottom of the stair banister, a habit which drove Derry insane. Uneasily, he looked around. Where were Derry and the twins? Gabby? No one had said anything about going out. He went into the kitchen, looked for a note. Nothing. The living room – nothing. He began to feel quite panicky, not quite sure why, but there was a crawling sensation of fear making its way slowly up the back of his neck. He found it in the bedroom, a blue rectangle against the white of his pillow. Tentative, he picked it up, took a slow deep inward breath and ripped the envelope open. Had Derry finally left him? But no, it was worse. Much worse!

  “Jesus Christ!” He dropped onto the bed as his legs buckled beneath him and the note fluttered to the floor from his suddenly nerveless fingers. “Oh, Jesus Christ, no! No Derry! Oh, no!” With a groan he buried his head in his hands, till a fierce hammering on the door downstairs brought him rocketing up again.

  “James! James! It’s me. It’s Sheila. Are you in there? Open up for the love of God!”

  Pelting down the stairs, he threw the door open. A white faced Sheila, flanked by an equally white faced Gabby stood on the steps.

  “The twins?” His voice skidded with panic.

  “Grand. Grand. They’re with Billy, back at the house. Did she leave you a note too?”

  James nodded. “She did.”

  “Well, come on, quick! I’ve got the car outside. We might still be in time to stop her.”

  “But we don’t know . . . ”

  “I do.” Sheila, caught him by the arm and pulled him out the door. “One of the few advantages of being married to a policeman. He can find anything out anyone’s address in a matter of seconds.”

  James turned a sickly white. “Did you tell him?”

  Sheila clicked the remote control for the car and the doors unlocked. “No! No! No! We don’t want the police involved in this. I gave him some stupid excuse and he fell for it. And why wouldn’t he? Do you really think he’d have believed me if I said Derry was on her way round there to murder Mick Roberts? He’d have had me committed.” She dived into the drivers seat as James took the seat beside her and a ghostly-white Gabby jumped into the back, tears rolling down her face.

  “It’s all my fault,” she wept. “Sr Peter was right, I’m neither use nor ornament.”

  “Oh shut up, Gabby,” Sheila snapped, suddenly impatient. “That kind of nonsense doesn’t help anyone. Let’s hope to God we get there in time.” The engine gunned into life and she screeched away from the kerb in a spray of gravel.

  ***

  The wine in Derry’s glass was very dark and very red. Blood red! She twirled the stem gently and the gloopy liquid licked up the sides almost, not quite, tipping over the edge. It smelt of Provence, of heat, of romance, of memories of James, of all those peaceful yesterdays when Theresa was just a dim and distant sad memory, more her mother’s than hers. She took a deep breath, a rueful smile curving her lips.

  “What can you do for me?” she repeated Mick Quinn’s words back to him. “Well, let’s see now. How about you start by telling me your real name?” She held up a hand. “Or wait a minute, let me guess. Is it . . . Rumplestiltskin? No. No. Silly me! Of course it’s not. It’s . . . it’s . . . “ she levelled him with her gaze. “It’s Michael Kinnane!”

  He looked startled, but he didn’t deny it. “How long have you known?”

  “For certain? Not for long. Though I guessed it a while back.”

  “It’s not a crime, changing your name.” His voice was calm, measured, though his glass shook slightly and the skin over his knuckles tautened to ivory. “There were reasons. Anyway, how did you find out?”

  “I’m a journalist,” Derry reminded him. She opened her handbag. “Here, you might want to see these.”

  He took the photographs she handed him. His parents’ graves. One well kept and tended. The other leaning drunkenly to the side, almost in sad parody of its occupant.

  “Odd,” Derry commented, scrutinising him closely. “What had you got against your father? What caused you to hate him so much that you would deny him dignity in death, that would cause you to disassociate yourself from his name and adopt your mother’s?”

  He flushed an ugly mottled red. “That, Mrs Quinn, is none of your business.” His mouth set tight. “So tell me, is that what’s brought you to my door? Planning on outing me to the gutter press, are you? Is news so short that you feel it necessary to parade my private business to the world?” He almost spat. “Dear God in Heaven, surely there are better ways of making a living?”

  Derry ignored the outburst. Rats in a trap always went for the jugular. “Shall I tell you what I think? I think you did something, something awful, something so shameful and horrific as to cause your father to disinherit you, his only child, and order you to leave Sunday’s Well. And you had no option but to go, to run away from your crime, to change your name and take on a whole new identity, to ostensibly become someone no one would every suspect hid a dark and dirty past.”

  The red had receded, leaving Mick Quinn looking strangely cadaverous, as if his face had suddenly collapsed in upon itself, his skin a dirty putty colour stretched tightly across the bones like canvas on a frame.

  “You’re mad!” he said, but the words were without conviction and triumphantly Derry drew herself up straighter on the chair. J’accuse!

  “Mad? I think not. Well, not in the sense of insane! Mad, as in furious, you bet your life I am. Mad enough to kill? Oh, most fucking definitely!” Slowly, deliberately, she set her wine glass down and picked up her handbag. Strangely her nerves seemed to have evaporated. Coolly, she pulled out the Beretta, hooked her finger over the trigger and pointed.

  “Jesus!” Jumping to his feet, Mick Roberts knocked his chair over, his hands flying up automatically to shield himself. “Is that thing real?”

  Cruelly, she gave him the Dekko sales pitch. “Beretta, 9 mm. Length 8.54”. Height 5.51”. Weight 2.55 lbs fully loaded. Semi-automatic. Fifteen round capacity.” She paused meaningfully. “But we don’t need fifteen rounds, do we, Mick-st
roke-Michael-stroke- Roberts-stroke-Kinnane? All we need is one well-aimed bullet. An easy death, really. Not like the living one you condemned my poor young sister to. Thirty years of hell!”

  “So, I was right. You are Theresa’s sister.” He seemed to shrink before her, a man whose past had not only caught up with him, but which was about to overtake him. “The resemblance is uncanny.”

  “Indeed I am Theresa’s sister, or Gabby, as those bitches of nuns called her. Ironic that, how both you and she should have lived under different names for so long. Only, in her case, she had no choice. You saw to that.”

  “I loved Theresa.” Surprisingly, a note of what sounded like real yearning entered his voice. “I was very young, only seventeen, but I loved her.”

  “Love!” Derry gave a great bark of harsh laughter and the gun shook dangerously in her hand. “Look up the dictionary and you’ll see what the definition of love is - a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. That’s what it says. That’s what love is! What you felt for my sister – my fifteen-year-old innocent sister – wasn’t love. It was lust, violent, self-gratifying, overpowering lust. You raped my sister, as a consequence of which she became pregnant and was banished, kicked out of her own home, locked up in tomb with a bunch of psychotic Brides of Christ,” she sneered at the expression, “and left to rot!” Her hand steadied on the gun. She took aim, tightened her finger on the trigger and pulled. “For Theresa,” she said, then closed her eyes and braced herself against the recoil – that never came. That bastard, Dekko, had sold her a dud. Disbelieving, she tried again, just as the door burst open and Gabby, followed by James and Sheila, tumbled into the room.

  “No! No! No! Derry!” Hurtling over, Gabby tried to wrestle the weapon from her hand. “You’ve got it wrong, all wrong!” But Derry pushed her away, held the weapon out of her reach, pulling the trigger again and again in the vain hopes that it would start firing.

  “Don’t Theresa!” she screamed. “Don’t save him. He’s nothing but scum. He deserves to die!”

  Theresa screamed even louder. “Oh, God, no. No, he doesn’t. Listen to me. Please, Derry, listen to me.”

  “He raped you,” Derry’s face was a mask of fury. “I know about it, Gabby. Sheila told me. He fucked up your whole life. He got away with it for thirty years, but no longer!” “But he didn’t!” Gabby sobbed. “Michael didn’t rape me!”

  “Then who did?” Derry demanded, pushing her roughly in the chest. “Who raped you, because somebody did!”

  “It was my father.” Michael Kinnane’s words dropped between them like a stone. His eyes locked on Derry’s “But I swear I never knew until now.”

  ***

  Michael was furious with his mother. All evening he had waited for Derry to show up, fending off the advances of those idiots, Deirdre Kelly and Coleen O’Neill, before finally getting fed up and telling them in no uncertain terms that Theresa McManus was his girl. And then finding out from the pair of gloating bitches that she had already been and gone, belittled and humiliated by his own mother. With tears of rage stinging his eyes he had abandoned his own birthday party and gone storming out into the night. As he drew near to the gatehouse at the top of the drive he saw his father walk out, adjusting his trousers. Even from a distance he could smell the sour reek of drink and his eyes in the moonlight were bleary and bloodshot. There was a long scratch on his face, fresh and bloody. No doubt he’d fallen down drunk and hurt himself.

  “What the fuck are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at your party?” Aggressive, he wheeled Michael round and pushed him in the small of his back towards the house and away from the gatehouse.

  But the disappointment of earlier gave Michael balls. “And aren’t you supposed to be at it too? Instead of . . . instead of . . .”

  “Instead of what?” His father caught him by his shirt front, bringing his face to within an inch of Michael’s own causing him to recoil from the smell. “Instead of what? If you’ve got something to say, spit it out, boy!”

  Christ, how he hated him! Only now did he realise how much. “Instead of putting yourself about with every whore going!” There, he’d said it, put into words what he’d known for years, what people had hinted at, their eyes sly, their mouths slack with filthy innuendo, giving voice to the unspoken thing that had caused his mother so much misery over the years. He braced himself for the punch he knew would follow, but to his surprise his father had laughed instead, at first softly, more like a chuckle, then throwing back his head and laughing so hard he had to stop and wipe his eyes.

  “So that’s where I’ve been, is it? With a whore? Aye, well you’re right Michael. I have been with a whore all right. Your whore! The one I saw you kissing in the stables last week. A fifteen-year-old strumpet called Theresa McManus. And guess what, she loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it.” He eyes gleamed malice. “Because it’s a man, she wanted. Not a wet behind the ears young lad!” He jerked his head back towards the gatehouse. “Go and see for yourself, if you don’t believe me. She’s in there now, trying to make herself decent or as decent as a slut can ever make herself. Still, I won’t deny she was a good lay. And she’s mine for the taking again any time I goddamn like.”

  And, his heart in his mouth, Michael had gone back and seen through the window the shape of Theresa lying on the floor, a pale breast exposed in the anaemic light of the moon and her skirt ruched up around her waist. He had waited to see no more, but turning to one side had been violently sick. Then, in a towering rage of hurt and betrayal, he had gone home, searched for his father, found him in the stables and beaten him to an inch of his life with a riding whip. Only the thoughts of his mother had stopped him from finishing him off like the animal he was. But as he went back into the house to grab a few possessions, he knew by her face that she had heard it all. He hadn’t been surprised when she ended it all a few years later. Saddened, sickened, but not surprised.

  ***

  “And you believed him?” Derry asked, as Theresa sat sobbing quietly to one side. “You believed the filth and lies he told you?”

  “He was my father. Besides he had a reputation with the women. They seemed to like him too.”

  “Theresa wasn’t a woman,” Derry dripped ice. “She was a child. Fifteen! A child!”

  Michael hung his head. “I know, but I wasn’t thinking clearly and on the face of it, it looked . . . ”

  “You should have looked closer.” Derry threw her sister a look of compassion. “Then maybe you’d have seen how things really stood . . .”

  “Please.” He cut her off. “You can’t blame me as much as I blame myself. I have no defence, except youth and ignorance and stupid hurt pride, I suppose. When I took off that night, I went to stay with friends in Dublin and later moved to the States for a few years. I did everything I could to cut my father out of my life. To bury my past.” He shrugged “The change of name. The neglected grave. You’ve put that together already.” For the first time, he looked directly at Theresa, his face heavy with guilt and sorrow. “I swear, I didn’t know, Theresa. If I had, I wouldn’t have stopped till I made mince meat of him. Please believe that. It’s the truth.”

  “I waited for you, Michael, there in the gatehouse. Waited and waited.” Theresa’s eyes were anguished as she revisited that awful night. “I thought you’d come.”

  ***

  “If this was a fairy tale,” Derry remarked to Sheila a few days later, as they strolled down the beach, “we’d have the traditional happy ending. Theresa and Michael, the lovers ripped apart by cruel destiny, would ride off into the sunset – cue the sentimental music. And they’d all live happily ever after.”

  “Shame real life doesn’t work that way.” Sheila picked up a stick and threw it for Skippy. “Anyway, they were kids then. Just kids in the throes of their first romance. Who’s to say they would even have stuck together? It’s tragedy that has interlinked their fates, nothing more.”

  “Oh, it’s true they’re very di
fferent people now,” Derry agreed. “How could they not be? One has been out making his mark in the world, whilst the other has had to suffer thirty years of the world making its mark on her.” She stopped and picked up a stone, brushed the sand from it and idly turned it over and over in the palm of her hand. “But you know what, I think she still loves him, but she’s wit enough to know that it’s a love that should remain in the past. No wonder, it came as a huge shock to her to see him on the television that night. Hardly surprising the poor thing nearly had a fit given the memories and associations that must have evoked.”

  “Odd that she called the baby after him, though,” Sheila mused, retrieving the stick from Skippy’s drooling mouth and flinging it away again. “Given the fact that it was Michael’s father who was the real father and not him.”

  “I asked her about that,” Derry admitted. “And she said that whilst she couldn’t ever love the child, she hoped that by giving it Michael’s name that some of his goodness would rub off on it.”

  “Will she ever want to see him, do you suppose?” Sheila asked.

  Derry shook her head. “I doubt it and whilst I would love to meet him, myself, I have to respect her wishes. James was right about that.” She drew a slightly ragged breath. “And so, I deleted his details from my computer. As of yesterday, Theresa’s son has once more been consigned to the great unknown.”

  “It’s probably for the best,” Sheila said after a slight pause, during which both women were busy with their own thoughts.

  “Probably,” Derry agreed, but her eyes were wet.