After the Silence, Page 2

  ‘It’s the ten-year anniversary next March,’ Henry said as if she might have forgotten about it, the date simply slipping her mind. ‘And with the success of all these true-crime podcasts and what not – people are rather keen on them, aren’t they? – there’s an appetite for this kind of story, it seems.’

  It was two Australian men who would be here filming, he explained. One of the men had family in west Cork; he’d heard the story about Misty Hill from his Irish cousins. Henry showed Keelin the email they’d sent, waiting for her to find her reading glasses so she could see the phone screen clearly.

  We don’t have an agenda, Mr Kinsella, and we don’t have any theories about what happened that night either. We just want to give you and your wife a chance to tell your side of the story.

  It was blatantly untrue; everyone had theories about the Crowley Girl and who, exactly, was responsible for her death. Keelin very much doubted that these men would be any different. She handed Henry back his phone in silence. ‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we’re in agreement, darling.’

  Later that evening, she picked up her husband’s iPad and crept into her dressing room. It was at least three times the size of her childhood bedroom: a cream carpet in deep pile, delicate wallpaper in swirls of vanilla and pearl. Two of the walls had silver racks lined with heavy wooden hangers, another had glass shelves for shoes and accessories, everything perfectly lined up in its correct place. Sitting at the marble-top vanity table, she googled the two documentary makers. She left the door slightly ajar so she would have time to hide the device if she heard Henry approaching, but all she could make out was the sound of his feet slapping against the belt of the treadmill in the gym downstairs. Noah Wilson, film-maker, Australia, she typed, finding an article in the Sydney Morning Herald the man had written about the role of St Patrick’s Day in Coogee, the suburb he’d grown up in. His pale, freckled skin and blue eyes betrayed his Irish heritage; even without the article she would have guessed he was the one whose mother hailed from west Cork. The Herald piece linked to his Twitter account, which was mostly retweets of praise their previous documentary, Closed Doors, had received, but his Instagram account was a more enlightening illustration of his life in Sydney. She scrolled through photos of Noah surfing, his hair tied in a high man-bun, poached eggs and avocado for brunch at beachside cafes, hikes taken up the Blue Mountains, but rather than the blonde girl Keelin had pictured by his side, Noah was holding hands with an attractive black man, smiling shyly at the camera.

  Jake, that’s what Henry had said the other film-maker was called. He’s Chinese or something, he added, waving away the unfamiliar surname. I can’t remember exactly.

  Jake Nguyen wasn’t Chinese, as it turned out, but of Vietnamese descent, as he explained to a chat-show host when he and Noah were on morning television to promote Closed Doors. Keelin had found the clip on YouTube, and she was struck by how handsome Jake was, his dark eyes deep set in perfect, smooth skin, a small cleft in his stubbled chin. He and Noah were the same age, she’d read, both in their late twenties, but Jake seemed the older of the pair. Noah nodded at every question eagerly, tapping his fingers off his knees; he was one second away from turning to the camera and waving to his friends watching at home. Jake, however, gave increasingly short answers; his mother was born in Hanoi, he said, but she’d moved to Sydney in her twenties to work as a nanny for a family there. ‘Your reasons for wanting to make this particular documentary are understandable, Jake.’ The host smoothed back an errant strand of hair as she looked at him with sympathy. ‘Jake’s mother was married to the infamous Lucas Taylor,’ she said, her voice hushed, ‘the man who slaughtered his wife and his daughters while they were sleeping before taking his own life in a tragic murder–suicide. It’s a story that shocked all of Australia, and one I’m sure many of our viewers will remember.’ A photo of a petite Asian woman flashed on screen, flanked by two grinning pre-teen girls, miniature versions of Jake in Day-Glo T-shirts and shorts. ‘Lucas Taylor,’ the presenter continued, ‘was said to be suffering from undiagnosed depression at the time of the incident. Coupled with the loss of his job at a local factory, he snapped under the tremendous pressure. Such a terrible story – that poor, poor woman.’ The camera on Jake’s face then, his jaw tight. ‘That woman was my mother,’ he said. ‘And her name was My Nguyen.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Keelin froze, jabbing at the off button. ‘I didn’t hear you come in, Henry.’

  He reached down to take the iPad from her. ‘They’re good, aren’t they?’ he said, squinting at the screen, holding it out at arm’s length so he could see.

  ‘They’re on the bed stand,’ she said, but her husband ignored her. He hated his reading glasses and refused to wear them in public, as if no one would notice he was almost fifty as long as he pretended his eyesight was still perfect. You’re getting older, Henry, she wanted to say. We both are.

  ‘You really should watch Closed Doors, darling,’ he said. ‘It’s beautifully shot, and a rather damning indictment of the manner in which society deals with domestic violence. It’s had a huge impact in Australia, or so I’m told.’ He shook his head. ‘The things these women have to endure, Keelin. It would break your heart.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Keelin resisted the urge to remind her husband that she had seen plenty of things that had broken her heart all the years she’d worked in the women’s shelter in Cork city. She reached for the bottle of cleanser on her desk, pumping some into her palms and massaging it into her skin. ‘I thought you were in the gym,’ she said, wiping the mascara off with a cotton pad. She usually preferred to remove her make-up in private, staring at the mirror while Keelin Kinsella disappeared and her old face returned to her. She was still Keelin Ní Mhordha then, she would think, underneath all the artifice. Still the island girl, born and bred. ‘I heard the treadmill.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been me,’ he said, gesturing at his shirt and pressed chinos. ‘Not exactly dressed for working out, am I?’

  ‘But I heard th—’ She stopped. There was no point in having this conversation, she knew. ‘Have you talked to Alex about the documentary?’ she asked, changing the subject.

  ‘I thought you should probably do it. He’ll take it better coming from you.’

  ‘Henry,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice level, ‘he’s not going to be happy about this, especially if they’re staying in his cottage. You know how particular Alex gets about his things. I don’t know if—’

  ‘He’ll understand how important this doc is, for all of us. Alex is smart.’

  ‘Alex is fragile.’

  ‘And that’s my fault, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Really, why must the parents be blamed for everything these days? It hardly seems fair.’

  He’s not your son, she thought, dropping her head in case he would see the flash of anger spiking through her. He was never your son.

  ‘Keelin.’ Henry crouched down, resting his hands on her knees for balance. ‘I know you’re not happy about this. I’m not exactly thrilled either.’ She could feel a smile twisting on her mouth, and she pressed her lips together to suppress it. She loved her husband, but she wasn’t blind to his faults, not least of which was his insatiable need to be the centre of attention. Henry had been born searching for a stage, a spotlight in which to shine. He was withering away on this island without it. ‘But these men are coming to Inisrún whether we like it or not,’ he continued. ‘This film is going to happen, even if we don’t take part. But I think we should, all three of us.’ He took her hands in his. ‘It will look bad if we refuse to cooperate with them. It’ll look suspicious. We can’t afford for anything to look suspicious, can we?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, for what else could she say? ‘You’re right, Henry. Email the Australians back and say we’ll do it.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘This is, like, batshit insane. You know that, right?’ Evie said
, staring at her mother from the screen of her iPhone. Keelin had thought someone had died when she’d answered her daughter’s FaceTime, such was the extent of Evie’s weeping. ‘What is it, darling?’ Keelin asked in alarm, unable to get a coherent answer for the first five minutes of their conversation. ‘You, you . . . Dad . . . I can’t . . .’ the girl sobbed. Her eyes were swollen, mascara smearing down her cheeks. ‘This, this documentary,’ she finally managed to spit out, and Keelin was almost relieved that it wasn’t anything worse.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me, Mum?’ Evie said. ‘Isn’t it bad enough that I was forced to go to school in, like, Scotland of all places, to get away from this shit? Can’t I just live?’

  ‘I know, pet,’ Keelin said soothingly, although, as she recalled, no one had forced Evie to go to boarding school. She wasn’t entirely sure it was possible to force Evie to do anything she didn’t want to do; Keelin certainly hadn’t been able to do so in the last sixteen years. She had initially objected to the idea of boarding school, reminding Henry of how much Alex had hated it, and then, in desperation, she’d cited the girl’s age – her daughter was only eleven at the time, practically a baby. But Evie persisted. She’d been miserable at the island school since Nessa Crowley’s death, treated like a pariah by her classmates for something she had played no part in. Boarding school would be a fresh start, she told her mother, a chance to be Evie again, rather than just the daughter of the infamous Henry Kinsella. She showed her father the glossy brochures over breakfast, talking about the ‘opportunities’ such a place would afford her, promising that she’d spend the weekends with her Grandma and Grandpa Kinsella, whose Scottish estate was only forty miles north of the school grounds. Finally, Evie reminded him that her first cousin had gone to the same school, and Henry, never able to bear the thought that his brother might have something that he himself did not, transferred the considerable deposit the same night.

  ‘And, and . . . it’s so cold here,’ her daughter said.

  ‘But it’s May. I thought it would be getting warmer at this time of year,’ Keelin said, prompting another bout of sobbing for some inexplicable reason. ‘Shh, love, it’s okay,’ she murmured, waiting for her daughter to calm down.

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ Evie said eventually, sniffling loudly. ‘It’s bad enough that everyone at home is, like, obsessed with the case, but if you do this thing on Channel Three, and Daddy said it might even get picked up by, oh my God, Netflix –’ she paused, her voice trembling – ‘then my friends here will find about it too. Are you trying to ruin my life?’

  ‘Don’t your friends have Google?’ Keelin asked. ‘I presumed they all knew about it anyway.’

  ‘I go by Evie Moore at school – I told you that when I first enrolled. God. You never listen to me, do you, Mum?’

  It was odd – Keelin could recall with perfect clarity everything that had happened before the night Nessa Crowley was murdered: her childhood, running wild across the island with her best friends, Seán and Johanna; those painful years with her first husband, whom she’d married because she was pregnant and it had still seemed vaguely shameful in Ireland to have a baby out of wedlock in 1991. Alex’s birth was seared into her memory, how she had counted his fingers and toes, each tiny nail a miracle; the death of her father, then her mother soon after; the day she married Henry, and his face when he held a newborn Evie in his arms and he looked as if he had found home, for the first time. But since the night Nessa died, Keelin’s ability to retain the minutiae of day-to-day life had weakened, her fingers prised off her memories, one by one. She felt like she was trying to piece together fragments of half-fading dreams, people wearing the wrong faces and answering to the wrong names, static buzzing around the edges of their words, none of it quite making any sense.

  ‘I do remember,’ Keelin lied. ‘I think it’s lovely you’re using my maiden name. I—’

  ‘Get a grip, Mum. It’s not for any, like, sentimental reasons.’ Her daughter said the word with disdain, as if gravely offended Keelin would dare to assume any such thing about their relationship. ‘And I’m not even using Ní Mhordha – no one would be able to pronounce that anyway. It’s just so I don’t have to deal with this crap.’ She tilted her jaw at the screen. ‘Well, you can forget about me coming home for the summer holidays. I’ll stay with Grandma and Grandpa instead. I can’t believe you’re doing this; it’s so selfish of you.’

  ‘Me? Why are you blaming me?’

  ‘Don’t yell at me, Mum.’

  ‘I’m not yelling at you. I think you’ll find that I’m speaking in a very calm voice, actually. And I was under the impression your father spoke to you about this matter already.’ (Did you tell Evie? she’d asked Henry that morning. Of course, her husband replied, buttering a slice of toast. She took the news rather well, I thought.)

  ‘He did,’ Evie said, her chin quivering. ‘He phoned yesterday.’

  ‘So why are you—’

  ‘This isn’t my fault,’ she wailed, the way she always did when she felt backed into a corner. I’ve told you a million times, take your shoes off at the door before coming into the house, Keelin would say in exasperation when her daughter was a child and dragging sand through the kitchen after a day on the beach. Evie would glance around shiftily, looking for someone else to blame it on, shrugging off any responsibility as easily as a snake shedding its skin. Henry found it funny, their daughter’s inability to admit she was wrong. The girl has the makings of a great politician, he would say. But it bothered Keelin. There was something sneaky about Evie’s behaviour that left a bad taste in her mouth.

  ‘I was also under the impression that you told your father it was fine to go ahead with this documentary,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t want to upset Daddy – he seemed so excited about it.’

  ‘Right,’ Keelin said, quashing the temptation to ask Evie why she was never worried about upsetting her. ‘Well, I’m afraid this is your dad’s decision, so any concerns you have about it “ruining your life” will have to be taken up with him. OK?’ The girl didn’t reply. ‘OK, Evie?’ Keelin said again, waiting until her daughter met her eyes.

  ‘Fine. I’ll talk to Daddy.’

  ‘Great,’ Keelin said, even though they both knew Evie wouldn’t say anything. She could never bear to disappoint Henry or risk jeopardising her role as his little princess. ‘I’m glad that’s settled then.’

  The girl blew her nose into a clean tissue. She was so like Henry, with those hazel eyes that turned green when she’d been crying, the same auburn hair, though she wore hers in a messy topknot. Evie was attractive in a way that wasn’t particularly fashionable at her age. She had been almost six feet tall by the time she was thirteen, her pale skin burned in the sun rather than tanned, and Henry had banned her from getting blonde highlights. Not a hope, Evie Diva, he’d told his daughter when she phoned home, crying because a boy from a nearby school had called her ‘ginger pubes’ at a local disco, her friends snickering in agreement rather than defending her. Keelin was secretly relieved that it had been from her father Evie had inherited her red hair – this humiliation would have been all Keelin’s fault, otherwise, and she’d never hear the end of it – but she felt sorry for the girl too. It gets better, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t lie to her daughter. Keelin had told enough lies.

  ‘Are you all right, my love?’ she asked gently, straining to see the screen as the sun emerged from behind a patch of cloud, filling her bedroom with brilliant light. She turned her back on the window to shield her phone from the glare, and waited for her daughter to respond.

  ‘It’s just hard, you know?’ Evie said. She looked heartbreakingly young then, the veneer of adulthood she was so determined to wear dissolving, revealing the child hidden underneath. No one will play with me, Mummy, she’d told Keelin in the months after Nessa Crowley’s death. The invitations to birthday parties dwindled, there were no more play d
ates with her best friend, Alannah. Evie had always been the queen bee in the small island school, playing one classmate off against the other to ensure they were all vying for her affection, and the girl was left floundering by her sudden demotion in status. She started to complain of stomach aches, refusing to go to school because she was ‘sick’. Keelin ought to have been firmer with her, she should have insisted Evie go to school anyway, should have arranged a meeting with the teacher to discuss the situation, but she didn’t have the energy in those early days. Fine, she had said, and her daughter would crawl into the bed beside her. They would lie there all day, waiting for Henry to come home.

  ‘I’m sorry, Evie.’

  ‘S’OK,’ she said, attempting to smile. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  But it is, Keelin thought. This is all my fault.

  ‘Anyway –’ Evie brushed her fringe out of her eyes – ‘you look nice. Give me a proper look at the outfit.’ Keelin stood in front of the full-length mirror, flipping the camera around so Evie could see her reflection. ‘Oooh,’ her daughter said. ‘The new Gucci collection! It’s flames.’

  ‘Is it?’ Keelin adjusted the navy cardigan with red and green trim. ‘I thought it seemed a bit . . .’ She paused, checking to make sure she could hear Henry pottering about downstairs before continuing. She didn’t want him to hear her call the outfit boring, not after he’d been so helpful last night. He’d found Keelin in her dressing room alone, sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching particles of dust dance in the sunlight streaming through the window. What’s wrong? he’d asked, concerned. She pointed at the racks of clothes, silently praying for her husband to make it better, she couldn’t do this without him. He had picked out the clothes then, talking Keelin through all the possible options, explaining the image she should project. He was so much better at this kind of thing than she was. ‘I don’t know, pet,’ she said. ‘It just seems like an old geansaí your mamó would have worn.’