A Secret Worth Killing For. Simon Berthon

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СКАЧАТЬ wants to retreat to her room but forces herself to stay with her da until the end of the weather forecast. She looks into the kitchen. The smells of cooking repel her.

      ‘Sorry, Ma, still off the food. Must be a bug or something I ate.’

      Rosa watches as she goes back up the stairs. Something unusual is going on with her daughter but she knows better than to press. It will all come out in due course, or just go away.

      Maire wants to go out, to run for miles, to lose herself in exhaustion. Anything to stop thoughts. But the summer nights are short and she’s afraid of the daylight. By 10 p.m. she can stand it no longer and leaves the house without a goodbye or see you later. ‘Must be something to do with Joseph,’ Rosa mutters to Stephen.

      She paces the streets for an hour, taking deep breaths, willing herself to restore the calm she’s now lost. Did they, or rather Joseph, deceive her and always intend to kill? Perhaps the policeman was carrying a gun – though, if he was, he kept it well hidden – and managed to grab it as they entered. But she heard no shots as she walked away. It surely means they must have taken control of him.

      Joseph gave her his word. He used the word ‘promise’. Was it a lie? Or was he lied to? She has a horrible vision of her brother as the mastermind. Surely that can’t be. More than betrayal, what she now feels is a sickening combination of terror and her own foolishness – the knowledge that she allowed herself to be deceived. She clings on to the hope that something went wrong in the flat – that he brought his death upon himself. That, in some sense, he deserved it. She wonders who will miss him and tries to banish the thought.

      Without planning it, she finds herself near Joseph’s street – he still lives with his family and they’ve used a friend’s place to sleep together. Unable to stop herself, she approaches the house. At the last minute she delays, watching for movement through any gaps in the curtains. She sees none, but some ground-floor lights are still on and she rings the bell.

      Joseph’s mother answers. ‘Maire, you’re looking in late.’

      ‘Sorry, Mrs Kennedy.’

      ‘It’s OK, love, come in.’

      ‘I was just looking for Joseph.’

      ‘Haven’t seen him today, love. You know how it is with him. Always in and out.’

      ‘OK, Mrs Kennedy, never mind. Thanks anyway. I’d better be away.’

      The next day is worse. Silence. Alone. She’s been hung out to dry. She tells herself again that this is what it must be like. Despite the falseness she feels ever surer of, she craves to see Joseph. Perhaps he really does have an explanation and it can still be all right between them. She listens out for Martin’s footsteps and one of his cheery entrances into the house. It doesn’t matter what’s said, she simply needs someone who knows to talk to.

      At lunchtime, the noose tightens. ‘The victim was Inspector Peter Halliburton, who was on secondment to local police from London’s Metropolitan Police Special Branch. Mr Halliburton, aged thirty-six, was married and had two children of six and eight. There has still been no claim of responsibility for his killing,’ announces the radio news.

      She thinks of him lying on the bed, his zip undone, his penis bared, a young man, husband, father, in the dying moments of his short life. She tries to justify it. He shouldn’t have come with her. He betrayed his marriage and those children. He was a representative of the occupying forces. The words and excuses taste of sulphur.

      Her one good fortune is that on Monday both her parents are out and she can stay in her room without need for explanations. In the late afternoon, shortly before her mother is due home, she goes out, propelled once again by some automatic, subconscious navigation in the direction of Joseph’s home. She steels herself to ring the bell. No answer. She knocks on the door. No answer. She backs away to look up at the first floor. The curtains in Joseph’s room are drawn. Either he’s still away or deliberately avoiding her. The question jumps at her. Could they have arrested him? Are they holding him, forcing him to implicate her? Surely his mother would have known. Surely Joseph is too smart.

      Early the next morning, 5.45, it happens. A violent beating on the front door, the sound of her father descending the stairs to answer it. She peeps behind a curtain of her bedroom window to see two armed police jeeps to the right and left and a police saloon, its roof light silently revolving. She hardly has time to take it in before two uniformed police enter her room with neither words nor knocking.

      ‘Get dressed,’ says one.

      The second speaks more formally.

      ‘Maire McCartney?’

      ‘Yes.’ She tells herself to resist the tears.

      ‘I have a warrant to arrest you on a charge of conspiracy to murder Peter Halliburton on the night of Saturday the twenty-third of July. You have the right to stay silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law . . .’

      Even as she dresses herself, and they pull her hands in front of her to apply handcuffs, it’s as if it were happening to another person. It belongs to a parallel universe. The person she really is could never have degraded herself to this.

      The walk down the stairs and out of the front door freezes her into self-loathing. Her mother and father watch, their eyes aflame with humiliation. She’s unable to speak, only to shake her head. Once inside the police car, she lacerates herself for being too weak to leave them words of hope.

      They take her to Castlereagh, a journey that is a badge of honour for anger-fuelled young men, a spiral into blackness for her. How do they know it was she? They must have soon worked out that the victim had been lured. Were her shoes still in the room, showing that a woman took him there? Could Joseph and friends have been so careless? Did they suspect Joseph and make the connection to her? Perhaps they’re just operating on that hunch and have no hard evidence.

      She slumps in a cell for hours, allowed only to brush her teeth and visit the toilet. She’s escorted to a bleak room where a woman in a white coat takes her fingerprints and a swab from her throat. She’s brought food but her sense of time begins to fade. All she knows is that, when she’s taken to an interview room, occasional shafts of light show that it is not yet night.

      Two men in suits arrive, a recording machine is switched on. They introduce themselves but she doesn’t catch their names. Again, she feels distant and disconnected. Her real self is floating on the ceiling above, looking disdainfully at the grotesque spectacle beneath.

      ‘We know you were with him,’ they say.

      ‘I’ve nothing to say,’ she says. It’s all she says that evening, again and again. At least Joseph told her to do that if anything went wrong.

      ‘Your brother’s a Provo, your boyfriend’s a Provo. You were with him in that bedroom. You leave, a few minutes later he’s shot dead by a gang of your friends. You’re going down, Maire. You’ve ruined your life, your career, dishonoured your ma and da. Think about it as the long night passes.’

      As they foresaw, darkness brings change. The unreality, the distancing recedes. She’s in a black tunnel with no light at the end. She knows she must not allow desperation to block her thoughts, but it’s hard to not keep seeing the puzzled, frightened expressions of her ma and da as she was led away. The hopes they had for her, the trust in their golden girl – all blown apart. Whatever happens now, there will always be a before and an after in her life.

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