Walking around the house the night he’d killed her, he had tested everything, checking how they reacted to their new owner. In the downstairs kitchen, he’d lifted the plastic tablecloth from the long wooden table, the one he used to run his toy cars on as a boy. The tablecloth, although changed many times over the years, smelled the same, the stench of old plastic rising, its suction being ripped from the surface. Parts of Cronly became stifling, overpowering. Memories skipped time, as if something that had happened a long time ago had only just occurred. All her talk of Tuscany had precipitated events; his trip to Italy to recapture his fleeting childhood memory of happiness; his accidental meeting with Antonio Peri, in the end, his mother’s ultimate damnation. Had it not been for her lapses into the past, he might never have found out the truth, and the thoughts he had laboured under ever since would never have unravelled, making sense of those events from so long ago.
He had displayed a remarkable calmness of spirit through it all. His mother’s death, ill for some time, terminal, was no surprise to Dr Matthews. The assumption that she had drifted into a permanent sleep was an easy one to foster. The small spasm her body gave out before the pillow quietened her; a perfect ending and far better than many poor souls suffered. He still remembered the eight Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Yes, in the end, right was done. Another man, a weaker one, might have shirked his responsibilities, but not him. Shirking responsibilities was not something he had ever allowed himself to do.
It hadn’t been easy, looking at her afterwards – her dead eyes wide open, her lower lip hanging down, her mouth ugly. To him, mouths said a lot about a person. He had made a study of mouths, and knew the ones to hate: people who spoke with the contents of their lunch a garbled mess on their tongues; old people with wrinkly, sucked up lips, no longer full of lustre; or those wretched women at the street stalls near Newell Design, using their mouths like sirens.
His mother had looked older in death, as if her body had finally been allowed to show its real age. He closed her mouth before the stiffening took hold, along with her eyes, placing a coin on each lid to keep them closed.
Within hours, her remains were removed, taking up residence at the funeral parlour, safe and sound. He had complimented the undertaker, Hennessy, on how well she looked in the oak coffin with its brass handles. They had both taken such care in choosing it for her.
All of this was necessary to keep up the fa?ade; how one was viewed within one’s own community was important. Even now, months later, he could still see her sitting up in the bed, propped by her pillows, giving her the appearance of royalty, ruler of her domain. He had seen many times how she could use her vulnerability, then her fragility, to get attention, but not any more. Like the good looks of her younger days, which had turned men into fools until they tired of her, she was gone, leaving him to forge his new beginnings.
After he had killed Caroline, he’d known he couldn’t keep the girl at the big house; the body would spoil. He had only managed to catch the fleeting cherry red of her lips with the Polaroid before they, too, lost their vitality. Catching the shade had pleased him, but the more he’d looked at the photographs, the more different she’d become. She wasn’t right – her skin was too pale, her hair lighter than he’d remembered it. There was something about the plaits, too, not finishing in the correct place. And her mouth, the colour of her lips against the cherry of the ribbons, looked maroon, more like the dying berries on the elderberry trees.
He checked his watch again, this time comparing it to the time on the Napoleon clock, both perfect, twenty minutes before eleven. Once he had the fire in the front living room blazing, he dragged in the plastic bag from the garage. It smelled putrid when he untied the string and opened it. The blood-soaked cloth used to wipe Caroline’s hair was at the top. Her earrings were already neatly tucked away in the attaché case upstairs – once a magpie, always a magpie. Remembering the ribbon in his pocket, he knew he wanted to spend time upstairs before leaving, but all in good time.
The living room and the garage took longer to clean than he thought they would; he had forgotten how much blood there had been. The garage was colder than the house, and he’d been forced to put on one of his mother’s old furs. When he finally got upstairs, he had barely any time left. It was a spur of the moment decision to take the Polaroid image of Caroline back to Dublin. He would have to keep it at Meadow View and although he wasn’t inclined to have visitors there, it irked him a little, never liking to link the past with the present.
By the time the fire in the living room had died down, it was past midday. He was still confident he would be able to make his next couple of social calls, just as he had planned.
Incident Room, Tallaght Garda Station
Sunday, 9 October 2011, 12 noon
AS SHE PULLED OUT FROM JESSICA BARRY’S HOUSE, Kate’s phone rang.
‘O’Connor.’
‘You talked to Jessica Barry?’
‘Yeah. Where are you? It might be easier to meet rather than talk on the phone.’
‘The Incident Room.’