She listened at the door of Eric’s room, heard his soft, vaporous breathing, and continued down the hall to the sitting room, surveying her work as she passed, pleased to see the house as neat as a new pin. Between bouts of sleep, she did what she always did when she was at the end of her pregnancy and prepared the nest for the new arrival. She was aware of being especially meticulous on this occasion, cleaning behind furniture three or four times, when she’d barely let the dust settle again. And Donal kept telling her to stop fussing – she had him agitated. Her husband’s fingernails were chewed to the quick. Because he put on a good show, of being full of swagger, his hands on his hips the whole time, like he was surveying the world and all that was in it – like he owned it. But all he was doing was bolstering himself. Because no one knew him like she did, and it was the first thing she had noticed about him when they’d started courting as teenagers, those chewed fingernails on those otherwise beautiful, strong hands. He could carry a ball down the pitch and kick it over the bar – he could score the winning goal. But his hands were shaking and he had to occupy them to steady them.

She had loved that, watching him play Gaelic, the way the other girls looked at him, like he was a prize worth winning – and he was hers. The first time they’d had sex was after he’d won the county final. She had never really known what desire was until then, had not felt what it was like to walk around all day filled with a secret heat that made you heavy and listless, light and determined all at once. She’d decided then, that was what being alive felt like. In her life Dolores had grown used to not getting what she wanted, but she remembered praying for Donal Mullen to be hers, and that had happened. And she sometimes wondered if she’d been punished for that – for wanting someone, needing them so badly she’d never questioned what their true value was. She hadn’t even cared that their families had pushed them together – she had asked God for something and it had been delivered to her and Donal would grow to love her over time, she was certain of that, naïve enough to believe children bonded people in that way. She wished she could be naïve again, just for a second.

She looked out the window and remembered that her car wasn’t there, saw Donal’s van parked in its place. Every day since the fire she had thought about putting her children in her car and driving to her parents’ house. In those first days her mother and father and sisters had hovered around her, watchful of Donal. She knew her parents would take them in and protect them – all she had to do was ask. But that wasn’t a life, living under your parents’ roof with three children and a newborn baby. Nor was it a life to remain with a man who was cruel and withholding, where their entire existence was maintained by lies. She’d tried to imagine going to confession and telling a priest what she’d done. Had she the courage for that, at least?

And then it occurred to her that Donal’s work van was the one place she hadn’t searched. She grabbed the keys from the hallstand and walked out to the car, squeezed into the driver’s seat, and pushed it back a few inches to make room for her belly. She checked the sun visors and his driver’s licence fell in her lap. She rummaged through every compartment and pocket, looked through cassette cases with no idea what she hoped to find in them. She opened the glove compartment again, this time taking out the manuals and flicking through them. A grey envelope fell out and landed in the footwell. She struggled to reach over for it, the gear stick poking into her belly. ‘Sorry, pet,’ she said. Written on the envelope in a florid cursive was ‘Colette’. She removed the letter from inside.

The Harbour View Hotel, Ardglas, 1 March 1995

Colette,

You’ll see from the address that we are not so far apart as the crow flies or at least I’m guessing we are in close proximity to each other. Part of this journey is to determine that you still exist, that you ever existed, that you were not something conjured by my mind. I sometimes imagine that my letters are carried off on an errant wind in the direction of Donegal and delivered to the Atlantic.

I have driven for four and a half hours to speak with you and if you are reading this then I have failed in that mission. When one doesn’t hear from another person for months it is easy to imagine that your message isn’t getting through in the most literal sense. What if Cliodna gave me the wrong address, what if you have moved somewhere else? Who is to say if any of the forty-five letters I have written have ever reached you? But tonight I fell into company with a man in the hotel bar (said he was the local butcher – fat fellow, bad colour, cheeks marbled with broken capillaries) and I showed him the address. He gave me directions to ‘The Cottage’ and told me ‘the Crowley woman’ was renting it, and I think it depressed me even more to know that I was just being ignored.

Forty-five letters – I can only apologise. Could you burn them for me? I am embarrassed by the cliché I have become and I promise you this will be the last letter I write. I will hand-deliver it in the hope of seeing you but if that doesn’t happen then I will be in the bar of the hotel until 5 p.m., when it will be time for me to get back on the road again.

You would think after forty-five missives everything that needs to be said would have been said, but if this is the last contact I will have with you, then there are a few things I’d like to say. If you look at the back of this letter you will find my new address and phone number. I’m living in an apartment near campus, not far from the one we briefly shared. I think I can finally say without any doubt that my marriage is over, and while our affair certainly precipitated that breakdown, there is not a second that I blame you for that failure.

And if you’ll allow me one final indulgence, there is something I have been thinking over. You said that I ran at the first sign of trouble, but it was you who asked me to leave when I showed the first sign of weakness. Also, you said that I was a man who needed a woman, and that you could have been anyone – that you were simply fulfilling a role. I have given a great amount of thought to that statement, because it troubled me all this time that there was something in the way I had behaved towards you that made you think you were anything less than the most important and singular and beloved thing in my life. Yes, I was useless, and slovenly, bad with money – I am working on those things – but there is no doubt in my mind that you are the truest love I have ever experienced and had I the chance to go back and correct my behaviour, if there was anything I could have done to change the outcome of things, I would do so in a second. But I am beginning to think that it was in fact I who could have been anyone, that you were looking for an escape route, a life raft, something to be jettisoned once you had reached dry land.

I don’t care. Give me five minutes and I promise I’ll never bother you again.

Love always,

John

Dolores folded the letter and looked up at the jagged outline of the cottage, its ruins written against the cold grey sky. This man thought Colette had reached a place of safety. She could almost taste the bitterness he felt at her need to be free of him. And she knew how that bitterness could poison a life, could make you lousy with exhaustion. She knew what it was to not be wanted.

But Colette had had a husband, a man who wrote her love letters, and a lover. And Dolores recalled the day when she saw ‘John’ put the letter through Colette’s door and her husband had jumped out of his seat and run to get a look at him. He was determined to keep Colette within his sights. But not a week later he had pursued her down the beach, and when he’d returned to the house, he’d said, ‘She’ll be out by Sunday.’ And she’d wanted to say, ‘Lover’s tiff?’ But when she’d looked at him, he was so angry – it was like a heat rising off his body.

She wouldn’t have suffered. She could hear his words repeating in her head. Fast asleep in her bed . . . A fire like that. The smoke. You’d take in a few lungfuls and you’d be knocked out before the flames would even touch you. And after all the bargaining she’d done with God to be rid of Colette, now she knew she’d never be free of her, that every time she closed her eyes she’d see Colette’s body being lifted from the smoking shell of the cottage.

Dolores put the letter back in the envelope and placed it in the pocket of her cardigan.

Chapter 27

Izzy dragged the hoover around the good sitting room. She pulled the plug from the wall and the trill of the doorbell filled the sudden silence. She jumped, knocked against a side table. The figurine perched there did a backwards dive onto the hearth.

‘Oh fuck,’ she said, staring down at the remnants of what had once been Just Out of Reach – a willowy girl with her left leg pointed behind her and her right hand reaching for the sky, her body one long, graceful curve. Now her pink skirt and white blouse were sundered. But her head was perfectly preserved, shiny and round as a marble.

She looked out the window and saw a car she didn’t recognise parked in James’s spot. That would piss him off, she thought. She checked her watch. They were almost half an hour early, and that would piss him off even more. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she said, stepping closer to the window. Pat Farrelly stood on the doorstep in full Garda uniform, next to a man in a checked blazer with a head of glistening black curls.

When she’d phoned the Garda station the day before she’d asked to speak to Sergeant Farrelly. She’d known Pat for years, played bridge with him most Tuesday nights, was friendly with his wife, Marjorie.

‘I have information relating to the death of Colette Crowley,’ she’d said and it felt unnatural to be speaking to Pat in this way. The only time she’d met Pat in a Garda station was when he’d signed her passport forms. Hearing her say Colette’s name, Sergeant Farrelly muttered, ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ Like when they played bridge and he had a bad hand. Never once looking up from his cards, he’d say, ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

‘This is serious, Pat. You’d better come out to the house and talk to me.’

He explained that the earliest they could get a detective down from Letterkenny would be the following day. And she implored him to conduct the interview at her home. She would like James to be present also, and she didn’t want the two of them to be seen going into the Garda station. She was sure he’d understand that.

‘If you knew how difficult it was for me to make this call, Pat,’ she’d said.

She’d told James as soon as he’d arrived home from work, that the Guards would be coming to the house the next day to speak with her. She was so full of determination that it came out as a taunt. He’d bucked his head and puffed out his lips and sat in front of the television for the rest of the night saying nothing. Later in bed, staring up at the ceiling, she’d said, ‘Look – be there if you want or hide in your office, I don’t care what you do. But I think it’s important we show a united front. You’re the one who’s always going on about doing things the right way.’

He’d rolled over, presenting his back to her. ‘Oh,’ he’d said, ‘don’t you know I’ll be there.’

The bell rang more insistently. She hurried to answer the door.

‘Gentlemen, how are you? Come in,’ she said. ‘You’re very good to come out to me. But you’re early. I haven’t had a chance to throw a shape on myself at all.’ She placed her hand to her chest, demurring, even though she knew she looked respectable enough in the black slacks and white tunic she was wearing.

‘Oh, will you stop,’ Pat Farrelly said, in that clipped way of his. ‘You don’t need to be dressing up for the pair of us. Sure we’re just here for a chat.’

She was introduced to a Detective Blakemore, shook his hand. She ushered the men into the sitting room.

‘That’s an unusual surname,’ she said. ‘What part of the country is that from?’ But the detective did not answer. She seated the men on the sofa and went to fetch a dustpan. She got down on her knees, scooped up the debris, and presented it to them. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘have you ever seen two hundred pounds in a dustpan before?’ She turned her wrist, shifting the remains around in the pan like a prospector, then sank down on her heels and laid it aside on the hearth.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘That’s all right,’ Pat Farrelly said. ‘Take your time.’

But the other man did not appear to be as sympathetic. Her resolve had deserted her, and he was looking at her doubtfully, like she might never get up off the floor. She heard a car coming up the drive – James, early as usual. She rose stiffly, pushing herself up off one knee, and sat on the sofa opposite the two men. She felt like giving up already, telling them there had been some kind of mistake. And then James appeared in the doorway. She knew he’d be annoyed that they’d arrived before him and he hadn’t quite had the time to adjust his expression. But she was glad to see he had a blazer on over his shirt and tie rather than the ratty old anorak he usually wore. He shook hands with the detective.

‘Will you make the tea, James. I haven’t had a minute all morning.’

‘Aye,’ James said, but he just stood there with his hands behind his back, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Not until she cast an angry glance at him and mouthed ‘go on’ did he depart the room.

‘Do you want your husband to be present, before we start, Mrs Keaveney?’ the detective asked.

She didn’t trust the man with his small, watchful eyes. Two deep lines furrowed his forehead so it was forever scored with suspicion. His eyebrows were grey and wiry but his head of tight curls was jet black. He dyes his hair, she thought, and that made her trust him even less.

‘I’m grand,’ she said, and focused her attention instead on Pat Farrelly. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders, and the thick, heavy material of his uniform made him appear even more substantial. She had spent so much time imagining this moment, but of all the things, the pure, irreducible fact of Pat Farrelly sitting on her sofa in his stiff navy cap – this was the thing that made it most real to her.

‘So, Izzy,’ Pat said. ‘You said you had some information for us.’

The detective turned over the cover of the notepad he was holding.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I do, and I’m afraid that I’ve been sitting on it for a while. I should have said something straight away but I suppose I was in shock. Because I knew as soon as it happened.’

There was a tap at the door, rattling – it edged open a few inches. Izzy walked over and opened the door for James, took the tray from him. ‘Didn’t I say it to you, James?’ she said, laying the tray on the coffee table. ‘The morning after the fire – didn’t I say to you that something terrible had happened?’

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said. ‘She was in a bad way. I couldn’t settle her at all.’

‘Because I knew something had happened. Even before I really knew, I knew – do you know what I mean?’

The two men stared back at her.

‘I couldn’t sleep that night,’ she said, ‘I was awake at all hours and at some point I got up to use the bathroom and when I looked out the window—’