The Last Thing She Did: a gripping psychological thriller full of twists Read online

  The Last Thing She Did

  Kate Mitchell

  Copyright © 2020 Kate Mitchell

  The right of Kate Mitchell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in

  accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2020 by Bloodhound Books.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-913419-76-9

  Contents

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  Roisin

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Sylvia

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Conor

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Roisin

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Sylvia

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  You will also enjoy:

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  Sign up today to be the first to hear about new releases and exclusive offers, including free and discounted ebooks!

  Why not like us or follow us on social media to stay up to date with the latest news from your favourite authors?

  For Hazel and Gianfranco, in the year that you two become three.

  Roisin

  2019

  1

  Nobody says he’s dying; they don’t need to. With his yellow skin and his hair all spiky where he’s been pushing his fingers through it, and his elbows like little bumps in twiggy arms, Roisin is reminded of that advert for cheesy strings. Except the cheesy strings on TV run about and her daddy just lies there. He’s string-thin though. He probably weighs less than Aodhan, who’s only ten. No, they don’t need to tell her. She knows.

  Nanny’s voice comes from the doorway. ‘No talking now, just sit nicely and let him see you. I’ll be getting him some dinner, so.’ The latch drops with a slight click and Roisin listens to Nanny’s slippers flapping into the kitchen, and then there’s silence.

  She sits on the stool and reaches across the bed to hold his hand. Paper-thin skin moves under her fingers and she thinks it’s about to peel off. She drops his hand. He opens his eyes. He’s lost most of the colour to the yellow of his sickness.

  He says, ‘Help me up.’

  She pushes an arm under his shoulders. A sharp bone pokes into her wrist. She can’t remember when he last ate anything except those slops Nanny gives him. Nanny will be in the kitchen now, mashing some of the veg they’ll be having later. Maybe Roisin should cook him a pizza, or a chocolate cake; he’s always liked her baking. His head drops back, over her arm, his mouth opens, and she smells mouldy oranges. His tongue has disappeared. Maybe he’s swallowed it.

  ‘Jesusmary.’ Roisin pulls her arm away and his head falls back on the pillow. She freezes. Seconds pass. Should she call Nanny? Then his tongue flicks out and along his lips. That’s okay then. She lets out a long breath, but her hand is shaking.

  Hearing a motor, she walks to the window, lifts the curtain, and watches Father McDonnell pulling into the yard in his fancy black car with its tinted windows, getting out carefully, tucking his scarf tighter into the collar of his overcoat and stepping on tiptoe to avoid the mud, coming towards the house. A shaft of sunlight reaches under her hand, and she follows it across the room. It touches her daddy’s whiskers with a silvery glitter and she realises how much the illness has aged him.

  His lips are glued together in a ‘mmm’ sound. He licks them again. She sits back on the stool, reaches his glass on the night table, dips her finger in and dabs some water onto his lips. He licks it off, and she does it again, and again.

  He’s trying to say something. She leans over him to put her ear close to his mouth. Now she can smell the skin on his neck. It doesn’t have the sour smell that’s coming out of his mouth. His neck smells of soap and woodsmoke. That’s because Nanny dries his pyjamas over the fire, but when Roisin thinks about it, that was always his smell. It reminds her of being little, and him coming in from working in the fields; she’d snuggle into that smell and he’d read her a bedtime story while Nanny got the meal ready. Her daddy has always been a cuddler, making a fuss of her, stopping everything to talk to her. Even when he was working. She’d go into the fields to find him, and soon as he saw her, he’d stop whatever he was doing and open his arms wide and she’d run up to him, jump onto him, her arms around his neck and her legs around his middle. He’d grab her legs and she would drop backwards and stick her arms out as he turned around, faster and faster, and as they twirled, she’d be screaming, and he’d be laughing with the fun of it.

  She whispers into his neck, ‘I miss you.’ His hand rests on her arm, with a slight squeeze.

  He says, ‘Rosie.’

  She lifts her head, steps back. Rosie? Her name is Roisin. Nanny went mad, that time she got her school friends to call her Rosie: it’s a proper Irish name, is Roisin; we’ll have no English nonsense, so.

  He lifts his head off the pillow, and breathes in a long, shaking, thin kind of breath. Roisin thinks it’s the death rattle. She knows about that. He told her, when Buttercup was dying, and he sat with the cow’s head in his lap, and there was this desperate sucking in of air, and it rattled out again, and then she was gone.

  But it’s clear as anything when he says, ‘Your – name – is – Rosie.’

  He falls back on the pillow, saying something about the end. She knows it’s the end. Her throat feels scratchy and she swallows hard to stop herself crying again. Not now, when every second counts if he’s trying to talk to her.

  She sniffs, swallows. ‘Sure, I know, Daddy.’

  ‘No, Rosie, listen. Find your mammy… End…’

  Her mammy? Does he mean his mammy – Nanny? She starts to get up, to call Nanny, but stops when he says:

  ‘I’m sorry, Roisin… Rosie, so sorry. Find your mammy… in England. Tell her I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you be taking any notice of his ramblings, so.’ Nanny appears at the other side of the bed, pulling the sheet up to his chin. Its starchy whiteness contrasts with his yellow skin. ‘Get yourself off and let the priest have a minute with your daddy.’ She waves an arm at Roisin. ‘Off you go, now.’

  In the doorway, Father McDonnell brushes past her. As he shuts the door in her face, she looks across to
the bed and sees her daddy’s eyes boring into her.

  2

  In the church, Aodhan hangs onto Roisin’s hand, wiping his nose with his other arm, leaving a shiny snail trail of snot along his sleeve. Wrapping an arm around his shoulders, she pulls him close, as much for herself as for him. Nanny turns her head, shakes it; she disapproves of making a cissy of the boy. On the other side of Nanny, Aunt Anne Marie is stony-faced. Roisin knows what she’s thinking: her vagabond brother has got his comeuppance at last. Anne Marie doesn’t mind speaking ill of the dead. Roisin overheard Mrs Sullivan talking to her as she arrived at the church:

  ‘Will ye be moving into the farm now, Anne Marie?’

  ‘It makes sense, so it does.’

  Nanny has other plans. Roisin went with her yesterday, to meet Father McDonnell to discuss the funeral arrangements, and he asked what she’d do now. Nanny said she was going to sell up, move to one of those new bungalows in the town.

  As they left, she tapped Roisin on the arm. ‘There will always be a room for you, wherever I live. Mind now, you must promise not to say a word to Anne Marie about the plan. She’ll say I’m demented and get the courts to put me in a home.’

  Now, Nanny hooks her hand through Roisin’s arm as they follow the coffin out. Anne Marie beckons Aodhan away from Roisin and Nanny to walk between herself and Niall, behind them. Roisin feels Anne Marie’s eyes burning into her back all the way to the open grave. As the coffin is lowered, she wants to jump after it, bang on the lid and shout to her daddy, ‘What did you mean?’

  Back at the house, Roisin goes into the kitchen to help Nanny and finds her and Anne Marie standing either side of the table. Aodhan is looking from one to the other, like watching a tennis match.

  Anne Marie piles sandwiches and little plates onto a tray, while saying, ‘It makes sense, Ma, for us to move in. Sure, you can’t manage the place by yourself, and Roisin’s going to be off to university within the year.’

  Roisin hands Aodhan a plate of cakes. ‘Not to eat. Come and help, pass them around.’ She picks up a plate of sandwiches and he follows her into the parlour, which is crammed full of neighbours and friends. While she hands out the sandwiches, Aodhan walks behind, copying her with his cakes. She knows Anne Marie will never get over it, when Nanny tells her she’s not getting the farm. Niall will have to carry on with his job in the city, doing insurance or sales or some such.

  When she slips back into the kitchen to swap her empty plate for a full one, Anne Marie is hissing, ‘Niall slipped out of line just the once with that woman in Kilkenny, and you’re still punishing him, not trusting him with the farm. And the Prodigal Son, meanwhile, who lived a dirty life over in England, and the liver cancer was the proof of it…’

  Roisin has heard it all before. Anne Marie always thought Nanny was too soft on Daddy, shouldn’t have taken him back. But he promised Nanny he was off the drugs, that he’d work hard and make it up to her, and he did. Anne Marie has always been angry with him, not just because he was what she calls a junkie, but she seemed to be equally angry that he sorted his life out. She overheard Anne Marie once, calling Roisin ‘his bastard daughter’. When she told Daddy, he said Anne Marie was jealous that she and Niall waited so long to have Aodhan, and then they had to do it with the IVF which made them bitter because it put them into debt, while he had Roisin all that time.

  As she turns to go back into the parlour, Roisin catches Nanny’s eye and winks. Nanny’s lips twitch, so maybe it cheers her up. Mrs Sullivan sticks her head around the door, calling for Nanny to come and sit down, but Roisin knows she won’t; she’ll be keeping herself too busy to think about it.

  There’s just the clearing away to do. Roisin gathers up all the glasses and takes them into the kitchen, where Nanny and Anne Marie are washing up. The air between them is electric. Aodhan sits at the table, trying to work out a puzzle which involves unlocking a bottle of beer from a wooden box that has chains all around it. He gave it to Roisin’s daddy last Christmas, and try as they might, neither of them could manage it. Roisin did it. It put her a few steps up in Aodhan’s opinion. She didn’t let on that she’d downloaded the solution from the internet. Let them think she was that clever. She’d put it back together again, and he’s been trying ever since. The tears are running down his little face, so he can’t really see to do it anyway.

  Roisin ruffles his hair. ‘He’ll be watching, laughing his head off at you.’

  Aodhan’s eyes fix on the damp patch on the ceiling as if it could be her daddy’s face, but at least he’s smiling now.

  Mrs Sullivan brings in a heap of plates from the parlour, puts it down on the press, and goes over to Nanny. ‘That’s the last, Bridget, so I’ll be off.’ Patting Nanny’s hand, she says to Roisin, ‘Be a good girl, now, take care of your grandmother.’ Why is everybody saying that to her, today? What makes them think she’s not going to be good?

  Nanny’s wiping the same saucer, round and around, her cloth making circles in the suds, while she stares out into the yard. Roisin follows her eyeline and thinks for a split second that he might appear, kicking the pile of leaves in the gateway, lifting his arm to wave to them as he comes in from the fields. That’s what Anne Marie doesn’t get, that they were a proper family: Roisin, Daddy, Nanny. He had changed back to the lad his mammy brought up: kind, hardworking. Nanny forgave him and probably loved him all the more for coming back to her.

  He never made a secret of the years he spent in England. He said to her once, ‘I’ve done terrible things, Roisin. I’ve been badder than you could ever imagine.’ But the cancer came out of the blue. The doctor said that’s how it happens with the hepatitis, it lays there, in your system, for years, decades sometimes, then it’s up and attacking your liver and before you know it, it’s too late.

  Every glass, bowl, plate, cup and saucer has been washed and put away. Roisin has pushed the carpet sweeper around the parlour, cleaned the spots off the carpet where folk walked the mud in from the yard, and flicked a duster over all the surfaces. Nanny has taken herself upstairs with a cup of warm milk. Roisin is alone for the first time today, probably the first time since her daddy passed. From the darkening parlour, she looks out at the moon sitting on top of the line of trees at the far field, a jagged quarter of it still missing, like a bright but broken Christmas bauble. She remembers Daddy explaining about the waxing gibbous moon. And then she hears his voice, and the words she’s been refusing to listen to, for the past five days: Your name is Rosie. Find your mammy. England. Tell her I’m sorry…

  His room is along a short, flagged passage behind the kitchen. Perhaps intended as a scullery or a cookhouse two centuries ago, it had long since lost its original purpose and was in use as a storeroom when Roisin was growing. It was decided he would move in here so that Roisin could have a room of her own and there could still be a guest room for when Nanny’s friend from England came to stay. The room reminded her of one of the monastery cells she’d visited with the school, with its plain white walls and stone floor: the only splashes of colour had been imported by herself and Nanny, with their rag rugs and the bedspread they had made together from knitted squares.

  Nanny has been in and cleared and swept and scrubbed, and the bedding is folded. There is nothing personal to be seen; even his paperback book has gone. Roisin turns to the chest of drawers where his best jumpers are folded and piled on top, ready to go to St Vincent de Paul, while his working clothes are in another pile. She opens the little left-hand drawer. Nanny has started to roll his socks into pairs and put them in a carrier bag, then she must have faltered, for the half-full bag has been left in the drawer. Roisin can understand why. The very opening of the drawer has released that smell of woodsmoke and it catches in the back of her throat. Tears drip off her chin onto the sock she is holding, its heel darned on top of darning. She wipes her face with the sock and stuffs it into her pocket. Taking a deep breath, she sets about finishing the job, packing the socks and underwear into the bag, until the drawer is
empty. The lining paper is creased and when she lifts it out, she sees it has been lined with old newspaper underneath. She is about to scrunch it up when she sees the headline.

  She drops two logs on the dwindling fire, switches on the table lamp and curls into the corner of the settee, cuddling a cushion for comfort, and reads the newspaper article again. Throwing the cushion onto the floor and pulling her laptop towards her, she presses a key and it kicks into life. She brings up the browser, her fingers hovering over the keys for maybe a minute. It feels like a betrayal of him, but surely it isn’t, for didn’t he give her the words?

  3

  At breakfast, she says, ‘Nanny, tell me again, how I came to live with you.’

  ‘Well now, your daddy had been in England, working, and you were born, and then, he brought you here.’

  ‘What about my mammy? Where is she?’

  Nanny puts the teapot on the table and sits down. ‘God alone knows, child. Didn’t your daddy say she deserted you, and he rescued you, and brought you home, to be looked after properly?’ The toaster pops and Nanny jumps up, brings the toast, then the marmalade to the table. She sits down and slowly butters a slice of toast, checking she has spread it into each corner. ‘Asleep in the back of the car, you were, hugging your little doggy.’