Brothers & Sisters Read online

  George protests but leaves to do as he was told.

  ‘Thank you,’ I manage as Mr McGrath brings me a tray.

  ‘I’ll be out in a moment,’ Mrs McGrath tells him. He doesn’t speak, not to me and not to his wife.

  ‘You get that into you, Rose, you need your energy.’ She stands by the bed. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ I can hear hushed tones outside the door and strain my ears to listen but they move, back downstairs.

  *

  ‘What’s going on, Tim?’ Mr and Mrs McGrath find Tim in the front room.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shakes his head in as much disbelief as them. ‘I was out cutting, I found her in the grass, I didn’t know…’ He couldn’t say any more. A ball of tears form in the corner of his eyes.

  ‘You didn’t know she was pregnant?’ Thomas asks, his voice more harsh than his wife’s.

  ‘I swear.’ Tim sits with his head in his hands. He hides the snot and tears that have erupted behind them.

  ‘Are you the baby’s father?’ Thomas queried, suspicious of the seventeen-year-old in front of him.

  ‘What, Jesus Christ, no.’ He stands and paces the room. ‘Christ no, what do you think I am?’

  Mrs McGrath is reassured by his reaction.

  ‘Why come here then?’ Thomas is direct. He was reluctant to give old Fitzpatrick a reason to fight with him. ‘Has it anything to do with George?’ His own son George, the same age as the young man that sat before him in tears. He walks to the window, looking out for his son, his temperature rises slightly. ‘Is that why she came here, I’ll break his fecking neck,’ Thomas exclaims, looking at his wife. ‘Do you think George… do you think he’s the father?’ Anger bubbles underneath his skin. ‘I swear to Jesus, I will strangle him.’

  ‘No it’s not George,’ Tim answers. ‘At least I…’ Tim pauses. ‘I don’t think so.’ Tim wipes his face in his sleeve and looks Mrs McGrath in the eye. He begins to count his fingers, the fifth of March will forever be etched in his memory, that was six months ago, the day that bastard Patrick got a hold of his Rosie. Why didn’t he see this before, why didn’t he know? But six months, would that make sense?

  ‘It did cross my mind too about George,’ Mary says, looking at her husband and then back to Tim. She can see his lips as he mouths the months while counting them on his hand. ‘That little baby is not full term, you know, he’ll need a doctor, so will Rose.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tim answers.

  ‘The baby is only four pounds, he definitely wasn’t the full nine months. She’s lucky, he survived.’

  ‘Is she?’ Tim clamps his hand across his fore head. ‘Would he be six months or so, I mean three months too soon?’ Tim knew the answer to his own question, he just needed the nurse to tell him it was possible.

  ‘That’s probably about right, three months premature, I’d say.’ Mary watches as her answers seem to anger him and confirm what he is thinking. ‘Which would make sense, seeing as no one noticed her growing belly. As I said though, I’m only a nurse, we need to get them a doctor.’ Her eyes roll upwards to where Rose and her baby lay.

  Tim’s fists clench by his side. ‘She can’t go to a doctor, she can’t.’ Tim states clearly, hoping that Mrs McGrath will heed his wishes.

  ‘Why?’ Mrs McGrath pushes for an answer.

  ‘Well, my father will kill her, for one.’

  ‘And two?’ Thomas interjects.

  ‘They’ll find out who the father is, and nobody wants to know that, least of all the child.’ Tim’s eyes fill with pain.

  Chapter 15

  Wednesday Morning – 2016

  As soon as Tim left his solicitor’s office, he dialled his sister’s number. ‘So how are you feeling today?’ he asked.

  Rose had expected his call, following her revelations the day before. But she had no idea that Tim was calling for something entirely different. ‘I won’t be running any marathons, I don’t think, but I’m not too bad,’ she reassured him.

  ‘So, nothing’s changed then.’ Tim was quick.

  ‘Not funny,’ she answered him, shaking her head in pretend disapproval. There was a sense of relief in having spoken to him, but then there always was when she shared her burdens with him. She sidestepped the washing that she had just folded and took a seat in the garden through the open patio door, knowing that Tim’s calls usually lasted a while. ‘I’m not sure these tablets are going to work for me though. My legs were jerking all over the place last night.’

  ‘You have to give it time, Rose,’ he said, comforting her.

  ‘To be honest, I’m looking forward to having some time for myself,’ Rose answered.

  ‘Point taken.’ Tim grinned. ‘You haven’t lost your sense of sarcasm then, I see.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ She smiled, knowing he wouldn’t have taken any offence even if she had. ‘But if I see or hear much more of you, I’m going to have to charge you rent,’ Rose finished.

  ‘Well actually, I’m going to have to come out to you again, today.’ Tim winced as he continued his sentence. ‘I got your prescription filled.’ He hesitated, unsure whether to tell her the other reason he was calling to see her. ‘And there’s something we need to go over.’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ Rose panicked. ‘And you’ve got work.’ She glanced at the clock; it was just turning ten.

  ‘Not as such, I’ve just been in with the solicitor and we need to talk.’ The beauty of running their own architecture and engineering firm meant that Tim had the flexibility to suit himself and with everything going on this past couple of days, he couldn’t concentrate anyway. ‘And Robert is keeping everything running in the office. I’m on email if they need me.’

  ‘I see,’ Rose said.

  ‘I’m on my way out to you. We’ll talk then.’ Tim paused. ‘I’d prefer to have the conversation, face to face.’

  ‘Okay,’ Rose answered, somewhat nervous by the secrecy. There was usually only one subject that had them talking in hushed tones and guarded secrets and that was Kilkenny, Rose was worried and Tim’s mention of a solicitor did nothing to ease her mind. She spent an anxious half-hour waiting to hear Tim’s car pull up outside.

  *

  ‘Wow.’ Rose sat fixed to her sofa listening to Tim. ‘Of all the things that I thought I was going to hear today, that was not one of them.’ She shook her head. ‘Unbelievable,’ she uttered, barely able to comprehend the detail of what her brother was telling her. Let alone what the discovery and the forensic investigation might uproot for them. ‘An actual body, preserved by a bog, of all things, on Fitzpatrick Farm. I just can’t believe it.’

  Tim looked up from his hands. His black framed glasses perched on his nose as he scratched his two-day-old beard.

  ‘Who is it?’ Rose was dumbfounded. ‘Do they know?’

  ‘It’s not confirmed, but…’ He scrunched up his forehead and exchanged a worried glance with Rose’s surprised one. ‘They are dating the body to around forty to fifty years ago and this Detective Kelly is asking a lot of questions.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she uttered again. She was shocked to the core. The dread of the past and everything that Fitzpatrick Farm was to her fourteen year old self crept silently inside her, stiffening her back and clenching her stomach out of shape. She had buried those memories in the deepest recesses of her brain but now, with Tim’s revelation, she was catapulted right back to 1970 and the reason why she had to leave.

  ‘I swear, Rose, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Now, this guy, Detective Kelly, who wants to speak to us tomorrow by the way, is a bit of a jump-up, if you know what I mean, full of his own importance,’ Tim said, almost relieved to have spoken about it. ‘He is poking around in the history of the farm, which they have now renamed the Estate, by the way, and for some reason is fixated on why we left it all behind us,’ Tim explained miserably. ‘I don’t know if his questions are relevant, but he is definitely leaving no stone unturned.’ Tim looked at Rose’s hands as s
he wrung them on her lap. He noticed, now that he knew there was something to look for, the paleness in her skin and rigidity in her muscle tone. Her hands looked cold. He wondered how he hadn’t spotted it before. ‘What a week,’ Tim said. ‘What a bloody year.’ His shoulder’s sagged, almost defeated. ‘He is working off the theory that it could be…’ He stalled before he said his uncle’s name, he hadn’t uttered it in so long, and it felt bizarre.

  Rose was a mile ahead of him; she had already deduced the timing and thought to herself that it was too coincidental. ‘Patrick,’ she said, only just tolerating the vile taste that saying his name had left in her mouth, it was a name she hadn’t allowed herself to speak of, in the forty six years since she had left. ‘There’s obviously no trace of him anywhere else.’ She shook her head, her calculations added up. ‘Not in Liverpool like father said?’ she questioned Tim almost a little too harshly.

  ‘Apparently not,’ Tim answered, not taking offence from her tone. He understood how difficult it was for her.

  ‘But father insisted at the time, that Patrick said he was going to Liverpool, he had been spouting off all evening in the pub?’ Tim nodded, he didn’t need to be reminded of the details, he remembered all too well. ‘Was that not the case?’

  ‘I don’t know, Rose, I don’t know.’ Tim blew out the remaining air in his lungs as forcefully as he could manage. ‘They won’t confirm anything yet, but it seems that it is the case, to me.’

  Rose moped for a while quietly, glancing sideways at her brother. Her chest tightened, the anxiety causing her breaths to shallow. She calmed herself as best she could to continue. ‘And you’ve been back down to the house, the land?’ Her eyes were wide with wonder. Questions that she promised herself she would never ask bounced inside her head like a ten-year-old on a trampoline. Long, locked-away memories were jumping to the fore.

  ‘I have,’ Tim confirmed. He knew what she was thinking; he also knew she wouldn’t ask. ‘Robert was with me,’ he added.

  Rose looked at his face, trying to extract even one ounce of detail of what he had seen, or what he had thought about when he saw it. His face looked older than she had remembered it to be, the tiniest of wrinkles spread from his eyes to his temples, and from his mouth to his jaw, like hairline fractures on his skin, evidence of a lifetime’s worth of stress.

  ‘That’s what you wanted to talk to me about,’ Rose just realised. ‘In the hospital yesterday, sorry, it’s only dawning on me now.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He nodded. The stillness allowed them time to think. She sat imagining the difference that forty-six years would have made to everything she had left behind.

  ‘Rose, talk to me.’ Breaking her train of thought, Tim reached across the coffee table and held her hand. ‘You had enough to deal with yesterday. I didn’t want to put this on you too. That’s why I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘It’s okay, Tim, really, I’m fine,’ she assured him. ‘I get it.’ She hesitated. ‘Did…’ she paused, afraid to ask the question. Forty-six years of keeping a promise had made it almost impossible for her to break it. ‘Did everything look…’ she swallowed hard and looked deep into Tim’s soul waiting to feel his answer. ‘Did everything look okay?’

  ‘It did, Rose, everything looked okay.’ He knew it was the answer she needed.

  ‘Okay then.’ She drew her shoulders back, as though readying herself for a fight. ‘We can see this, Detective Kelly tomorrow. We have nothing to be ashamed of.’ She looked at her older brother and saw him as a strong seventeen-year-old once more.

  ‘The questions might be a little harsh, just so you know.’ Tim had been armed with a briefing from his solicitor. ‘There are two detectives on this case, Detective Kelly and Detective Kennedy; I’ve only met Kelly yet,’ he added. ‘For some reason, Detective Kelly is hell-bent on figuring out why we left Fitzpatrick Farm.’ Tim rubbed his face. ‘As though, that’s going to help him solve this case.’

  ‘We keep our promise though, okay, for everyone’s sake, right?’ Rose insisted. ‘We haven’t come this far to have everything dug back up…’ She looked at Tim, almost smiling at the bad choice of words. ‘You know what I mean,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ Tim agreed.

  ‘Do you think we should tell him the rest?’ Rose wasn’t the type to wallow in her past and didn’t relish the thought of rehashing her childhood to satisfy this Detective Kelly’s curiosity, but if it was reason he wanted, well, that was reason enough.

  ‘No. I don’t know,’ Tim said again. He wasn’t sure that revisiting the hidden history or raking up secret memories was going to help anyone. ‘Rose, don’t let him walk all over you, you know. It’s your business, not his, remember, it’s just helping him with his enquiries, we are not under suspicion or arrest. Okay?’

  ‘Okay and the solicitor?’ Rose asked.

  ‘He reckons it might be a bad signal to send, if we show up all lawyered up. He says to ring him if we want him, or want to check a question with him and that he can get to us if needs be.’

  ‘Okay then,’ Rose agreed. But, for the second time in as many days, she felt as if her world had been turned upside down.

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday Morning – 2016

  ‘Hi Lucas, it’s me.’ Marie paused to give him a chance to think, it had been years since they had spoken. ‘I was hoping to run something by you, I sort of…’ she stumbled a little with her words. ‘I eh, need your help?’ Her voice sounded like it had always done, he recognised it straight away.

  ‘Wow, there’s a sentence that I would never have thought I’d hear you say again,’ he said. She could hear him draw a deep breath and swallow. ‘Actually, I think the last thing you said was that you never wanted to have anything to do with me ever again, if I’m not mistaken.’ A phone call, after nearly twenty years of silence from Marie, was the last thing he had ever expected.

  ‘Lucas, we were only kids,’ she said, expecting something of a backlash, seeing as they hadn’t been in touch since college. ‘It wasn’t like that, Lucas, and you know it,’ she said. ‘Us getting together would have been a massive mistake.’ He didn’t answer her. ‘I didn’t want it to ruin our friendship, which I suppose is the biggest irony,’ she said, her voice trailing off.

  ‘Anyway, we’ve all moved on, I suppose,’ Lucas said, trying to appear unfazed. It wasn’t every day that the one girl that broke his heart phoned him out of the blue. ‘I presume you’re married and living in a mansion with a load of children, and you’ve probably written your novel by now,’ he added, trying to sound funny. While they were in university together, Marie wasn’t just a crush for Lucas, she had become an obsession, an itch that got right under his skin, an itch that he couldn’t scratch. He had been devastated when she didn’t feel the same way about him.

  ‘All true,’ she said, ‘Bar the novel bit.’ She giggled. ‘You?’

  ‘Oh, same,’ he replied. ‘Bar the married bit, and the children bit, oh, and the living in a mansion and the novel bit.’

  ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on your career,’ she said. ‘Very impressive. I knew you’d do well.’ His reputation had elevated him in the industry, making him the standout journalist of the year for his hard-hitting investigations.

  ‘Thanks,’ he paused. ‘What about you?’ he asked, not really wanting to know the answer, he had thought about her from time to time and wondered if she had stayed with him, that older man that she had left him for. He wanted to ask her if she had married him, but didn’t.

  ‘Well, left the job in the Sunday Independent,’ she said. She always worried how it might be perceived, especially by those that she went to university with.

  ‘I see,’ he said. He had already known she hadn’t been there for years, he had wondered why she left. ‘Why did you leave?’ His voice felt like stretched elastic.

  ‘Life changed, Lucas, that’s all. Got married, had two children, Jack who’s eleven and Eve who’s eight.’ They both fell silent waiting for the other to speak.
‘Lucas,’ she said finally, ‘I have a bit of a problem and I need someone, you know, who knows the business, to kill a story for me, or if not kill, at least bury it.’

  ‘What you do, murder someone?’ he said, trying to sound as though he was laughing.

  ‘No, not me, but there has been a murder and well, it’s complicated, I need to know that you’ll do it.’ She was reluctant to elaborate, she needed his assurance that he could help before she confided in him.

  ‘Are you in trouble, Marie?’ Lucas said. He stood from the desk and paced around the floor. He refreshed his laptop screen and checked his notifications, no new murders reported, although he wouldn’t pick up the Irish scene as quick as his Irish counterparts. He typed, ‘Dublin Murder.’ Five showed up, he scrolled as quickly as he could, searching unsuccessfully for a connection to Marie. The coincidence of hearing about two Irish murders in the space of an hour wasn’t lost on him.

  ‘No, not as such, Lucas, it really is complicated.’ She sighed heavily and searched for the best words to use. ‘It’s Michael, Lucas.’ She cringed as she spoke her husband’s name to him. Old wounds were the hardest to heal. She imagined Lucas holding his breath at the mention. ‘A body has been discovered, and well, the local media are bandying his name about suggestively…’

  ‘Did he do it?’ Lucas interrupted, he listened intently for her giveaway signs.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said and laughed nervously. ‘It’s just that it, the body, was found on our land and well, you know the way it goes, now every time it’s reported…’ she cleared her throat before she said his name, ‘Michael, is in the image behind the headline.’

  ‘Michael,’ he repeated. Michael, the guy she had left him for in college. A lecturer in Agricultural Science, he was the reason they never spoke again, she picked Michael over Lucas and he had never forgiven her for it.

  ‘Yes,’ Marie sighed. ‘Michael.’

  ‘The Michael,’ Lucas repeated. He took his phone from his ear.