Prologue
Ardglas, County Donegal, March 1995
When the detective asked Izzy what had woken her that night she could not say exactly. She’d been sleeping badly all winter. It was not uncommon for her to wake three or four times in the night. It was also the first time in several weeks she’d shared a bed with her husband, but she did not mention that. At some point she’d needed the toilet. Crossing the landing, she’d stopped at the window and looked out across the bay. It had become her habit in recent months to pause there and try to locate the point where on a clear day the gable of the cottage was just visible. The sky was mottled with cloud, the first of the morning light seeping through. Black smoke hung over the headland.
‘And straight away, I knew something had happened,’ she said. ‘Even before I really knew, I knew – do you know what I mean?’
The two men stared back at her.
‘But how did you know, Izzy?’ Sergeant Farrelly asked her.
‘Well, when I saw the smoke I—’
‘No, Mrs Keaveney,’ the detective said. ‘How did a woman living two miles across the bay look out her window and see a bit of smoke and know the fire had been set intentionally?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s another story altogether.’
Chapter 1
October 1994
There had been two masses already that morning and the air was thick with incense. The church was packed and Izzy found herself squeezed between two bodies. Each time she went from kneeling to sitting to standing, she felt their shoulders press against hers. She pulled a balled-up tissue from her sleeve and wiped the sweat from her forehead. She thought of removing her woollen jumper but wasn’t sure if the top she had on underneath was decent, and besides, she’d never manage the manoeuvre without hitting the person next to her or exposing some part of her flesh. She didn’t think she could suffer an embarrassment like that this morning. Raising her head, she was confronted by the sight of Stasia Toomey’s broad back looming before her. Stasia stood stately and proud, tightly wrapped in a coat of royal-blue gabardine.
Kneeling again, Izzy caught the smell of sweat rising from her armpits. She bowed her head and closed her eyes.
And then the responses started. She took a long, slow breath.
‘Lord have mercy.’
Lord have mercy.
She had managed to drag herself out of bed for half-eleven mass. It was one thing to have been drinking, but to stay in bed with a hangover was to admit you had been drunk. She rarely drank to excess, so she wasn’t going to give James the satisfaction of using this against her. She’d slipped out of the spare room to make a cup of tea, saw the pictures lying scattered across the floor. The night before, when they’d returned from the local businesses’ dinner-dance, she’d insisted to James that she was sleeping downstairs in the spare room. She went careening down the hallway, knocking every picture frame off the wall. James had grabbed her arm and she’d planted an elbow in his ribs. He’d let out a roar, and of course, Niall and Orla had woken. And that was the image she couldn’t get out of her head – the two of them conjoined in horror, staring down at her from the landing.
She’d hurried back to bed with her cup of tea so as not to have to face any of them, but now as she knelt in the church, the collective responses to the prayers rising and falling in her empty stomach, she wished she’d eaten something.
‘Christ, have mercy.’
Christ, have mercy.
She tried to focus on Father Brian – the solid shape of him behind the altar. He was decked out in his Sunday finery, his vestments so clean and crisp and trimmed in shades of gold and silver, the stole embroidered with tight little bunches of grapes and ears of wheat. She reminded herself to say this to him next time he visited her: You were all decked out in your finery last Sunday, Brian. It suited you. The finest dress I’ve seen you in so far. Because she knew this was the part of the job he hated most, that it would forever be an embarrassment for him to present himself to people in this way. She thought of the wry smile he’d offer when she said this, the gentle putter of his laugh.
Oh Lord, it is your will that all shall be saved.
Someone near the front of the church rose. A tall woman with a mane of black hair stepped up and turned to face the lectern. Izzy felt a sharp little breath escape her. Colette Crowley, she thought – in all her glory. Such a fine-looking woman, it did you good just to rest your eyes upon her. The way she held her head so high. The length of her. The graceful tilt of her chin. And as she looked out at the congregation a smile played about her lips for a moment like there was something funny to her about all of this. Like she’d played a trick on them. Like she’d never really left at all. Izzy saw Stasia Toomey nudge her husband. A few people were overcome by fits of coughing. She cast an eye around to see if Shaun or Ann was present but couldn’t spot them anywhere.
And then Colette spoke in that beautiful, soft Dublin accent of hers – a reading from the prophet Isaiah – but Izzy was not listening to the words, just the sound of her voice. She was neither a coarse jackeen nor a pretentious south-sider – she was something else altogether and Izzy could have listened to her all day. And people stared up at her, like the vision she was, and when Izzy’s eyes drifted across the altar to where Father Brian was seated in his big marble chair, she saw the soft, sympathetic look he offered to Colette Crowley.
Give the Lord glory and power – that was the response Colette demanded of them, and Izzy thought that a bit bombastic: Hadn’t he power and glory enough?
And then Colette descended from the lectern, stepping carefully, minding the hem of her long skirt. A shuffling of bodies filled the silence that had fallen over the church. Izzy watched Stasia Toomey’s gaze track Colette all the way down the aisle, the hard set of her jaw easing only when Colette had knelt in her pew. But Father Brian did not move from where he was seated. He looked so still, so poised, his hands resting delicately on his knees like he was meditating over every word Colette had said. Izzy brought the tissue to her brow but there was nothing in her hand. She looked down and saw the tissue scattered across the hassock like snow.
* * *
He was purposely avoiding the main street of the town; this was what she’d thought to herself as they drove along the Coast Road the previous night. James was avoiding the main street, so they wouldn’t have to pass the shop. The papers had needed to be signed and returned to the agent that afternoon but James had arrived home late from work, unknotting his tie as he came through the door and complaining about how they’d never make it to the dinner on time. She’d left the contract on the kitchen table where, she knew, he’d seen it every time he passed. It had lain there for a week with only her signature filled in. And now they were taking the Coast Road to get around a conversation about how he had reneged on his side of the deal.
The road rose steeply and narrowed as they drew away from the town. It followed the coastline more closely – hills rose up on one side and tumbled down into the Atlantic on the other. The moon hanging low over the bay looked like someone had pared a sliver off it with a knife. She lifted her handbag from the footwell, snapped it open, took out a mint, and snapped the clasp shut again. She unwrapped the mint and popped it in her mouth, clacked it against her teeth. She turned on the radio, heard the beat of dance music, turned it off.
‘It must be great not to want things,’ she said, at last.
She watched his arms stiffen against the wheel. A muscle flickered in his cheek.
‘It must be great to be so satisfied with your life, to have all your needs met,’ she said. ‘I wish I could say the same.’
‘You know it wasn’t the right time,’ he said.
‘And when will the right time be?’
‘I don’t know . . . maybe it’s not the right property.’
‘It’s going for a song.’
‘Exactly. Why do you think that is?’
‘Because it’s been allowed to go derelict – a lick of paint and bit of money spent on it is all it needs.’
‘It failed when it was a gift shop, it failed when it was a bakery, it failed when it was a music shop—’
‘Well, it worked when it was a flower shop and I ran it.’
