Joe had wanted to marry me when he heard about the baby. And what had I wanted? I look back at that young woman and I see a head filled with silly notions. I took the easy choice I guess, there’s a laugh. Ignorance, I’ve learned, fashions its own crosses.
At the beginning, the pregnancy made me feel trapped, I remember that. Up until then everything had been fine with Joe. Expecting a baby changed the agenda completely. If anything, I felt like a mouse caught in a maze that had no exits, only dead ends. Of course, it wasn’t as if I had to marry him. My mother would have understood; I know that now. But it was never about her understanding. It was about disappointment, about feeling that I had let her down.
I never finished college, but I suppose by then I was happily married, or so my mother thought. In those early days of pregnancy, I should have known that I didn’t love Joe. If I had loved him, I wouldn’t have felt so trapped.
When Joe and I were first married, it was like playing a game of happy families. It made Joe happy, the idea that we were going to have a child, and he became even more attentive than before. He was kind and funny – all the things that made Joe who he was. I suppose they all got exaggerated, hyped, tricking us both into believing the world would be a better place because of the baby.
I closed my eyes to all the danger signs; I didn’t want to see them. And then there was the biggest one of all, the one that I only recognised later. It was the way Joe never held too high an opinion of himself, the way he’d put himself down. It wasn’t obvious at first. He hid it well with others and, to an extent, with me. He used his exterior good humour and bravado to overcompensate for his low self-esteem. I understood later, though too late, how this made him hold such an exalted opinion of me. My stupidity and Joe’s delusion tricked us both. Two blind mice … see how they run …
SAC (Special Area of Conservation)
Saturday, 8 October 2011, 7.30 a.m.
DRIVING OUT OF RATHMINES, KATE’S MIND WAS churning with questions about the case. She needed to find out who Caroline Devine was, the kind of person she had been, and if Amelia Spain turned out to be the next victim, what links there were, if any, between the two girls. Understanding the victim, or victims, would give her a better grasp of how each of them would have behaved given a particular set of circumstances.
If they came across as confident but somewhat distant, the perpetrator may have taken their behaviour as an insult and been angered by it. In both cases, the girls were on the brink of adulthood; many of their values would not yet have been fully formed. Adolescence was a time when things changed, when what had gone before was not always indicative of what would follow. If she was right and Caroline hadn’t been chosen at random, the girl could have inadvertently encouraged her abductor. There had to be a reason why she’d been taken. If Kate could work out what that reason was, it would give her a clearer picture of the killer.
Heading up the mountain road, she thought again about the argument she’d had with Declan the previous night about looking after Charlie on Saturday. He’d agreed in the end to mind Charlie – something he never usually minded doing – but she knew that wasn’t the real reason for his anger. ‘We all have choices,’ he had told her. But in her mind right now the death of a young girl and the possible killing of another took precedence. Kate thought of Charlie. She had checked in on him before she’d left. He had been deep in sleep, one hand resting on his pillow, the other clenched across his chest.
As she drove, she also thought of her own mother. It had been days since she had visited her at Sweetmount, something else for her to feel guilty about, and something else she would have to put to the back of her mind for now. She knew from the text she got from O’Connor earlier that Amelia still hadn’t returned home. Army helicopters would begin roaming the area from first light, and a full-scale search operation would soon be underway. One of her first starting points in this case would have to be the area where Caroline had been buried – the grave was the last connection to the killer.
≈
The road from Bohernabreena towards the Military Road had varying levels of steepness, the landscape opening out to a vastness of lush green fields and mountains capped with dense forests. Small cottages and larger homes dotted the road either side until Piperstown, where civilisation in the domestic sense ended and the barrage of police entourage began.
Kate pulled her car in tight to the side of the ditch; even from a distance she could see O’Connor’s agitation. Things were moving fast, faster than he would have wanted, but the look on his face said he had every intention of moving with it, and all around him better keep up or get the hell out of there.
‘O’Connor.’
‘Right, you’re in for now. Nolan was sceptical, but even he knows this thing is shaping up a whole lot differently from anything we’ve dealt with before.’