The Doll's House

Kate said nothing about having to change the sheets on Charlie’s bed, as he reluctantly allowed her to remove the Power Ranger T-shirt he’d worn the night before. Neither did she mention cleaning up the mess in the kitchen – a large pool of milk and cereal on the table and the floor. For now, the only important thing was Charlie feeling okay. She had had a broken night. Rising at dawn, she had already spent a couple of hours in her study at the back of the apartment, setting out her plans for the following week.

Once the mess was tidied up, Kate called to Charlie who, as on most other Saturday mornings, was watching cartoons in the living room. ‘Come on, Charlie. Shane and his mum will be here any minute.’

‘I don’t know where my clothes are.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the television.

‘They’re on the bed. Hop to it.’ Kate switched off the cartoons using the remote control.

‘Ah, Mum, don’t.’

‘I just did, Buster. Now, go before I get cross.’ She’d kept her tone gentle.

‘Bold Mum,’ Charlie snapped back, his lower lip stuck out.

‘Less of that, Charlie Cassidy.’

Kate hadn’t changed her surname after marrying Declan, but there was never any doubt as to which their son would have. Trying to keep her face straight, she called to him again, ‘I can see Shane’s mum parking her car – come on, hurry up.’

‘Is Shane with her?’

‘Of course he is, and they’ll be here in a second. Now come on!’

As Kate waved goodbye to Charlie from the front window of the apartment, an unexpected wave of loneliness swept over her. Suddenly the apartment was quiet again, without a living soul to talk to. Kate had made up her mind earlier to use this free time to go for a run, something she hadn’t done in ages. It was only as she walked out from the bedroom in her running gear that she noticed the orange flashing light on her answering machine. Tying her long black hair in a ponytail, she pressed the play button.

She had been expecting a call from Declan, knowing he would be upset to have missed Charlie. Instead, she heard police sirens roaring in the background and O’Connor’s voice filling the room. His message was blunt: ‘Middle-aged male, multiple stab wounds, found drowned in the canal. You have my number. Call me.’

O’Connor wasn’t one for social niceties, or unnecessary detail, but after what they had been through together in the Devine and Spain murders, a simple ‘Hello, Kate’ shouldn’t have been too much to ask. As she was thinking this, another thought crossed her mind. If O’Connor wanted her involved, this wasn’t going to be any ordinary investigation.

On her first attempt at ringing his mobile phone, she got ‘Please leave a message.’ Forgetting about her run, she switched on the television to check if anything important had hit the headlines. The story was already up on Sky News and, like all top news stories aimed at whetting the public’s appetite, it had the markings of one that would run and run.

According to the news reports, on the previous night the well-known television personality had waved goodbye to a group of downbeat Ireland supporters in Gogan’s pub after the soccer team’s crashing defeat against Germany. He had made his way to the Caldine Club on Kildare Street in Dublin’s city centre. Images posted on Facebook that morning of the last photographs of the TV personality’s life formed part of the news coverage. Men and women wearing the green jersey, who had managed to be the last of the many public faces captured with the popular celebrity, had earned their place in the record books, not for what they had thought was Ireland’s historic defeat but because, unknown to them, they would be among the last to see the television personality alive.

Neither the popular TV host nor his long-running morning show was a favourite with Kate. Unknowns airing their dirty linen in public, being booed or cheered on by the audience, usually caused her to change channel. People with broken lives, willing to forfeit everything for their desperate few minutes of fame, made her want to cringe rather than empathise. Keith Jenkins was considered a man who pushed out cultural boundaries, asking questions others didn’t ask.

The ever-smiling Keith Jenkins could inspire drama in the most mediocre family circumstances – an estranged husband engaged in a love affair with his pigeons, an unmarried mother loving the father of her child despite his denials of parentage, a woman putting drink ahead of her grown-up children, all had danced as players in the nation’s most popular car-crash television programme, Real People, Real Lives. If the advertising campaigns promoting it were to be believed, it had found its way into the hearts and minds of a nation.