The Last Thing She Did: a gripping psychological thriller full of twists Page 2

  ‘Soggy doggy?’

  ‘The same. You didn’t let go of that little toy for years. Its ears fell off, in the end, from you sucking away at it.’

  Roisin knows exactly where that cuddly toy is. ‘Did he say anything else about my mammy?’

  Nanny chews her toast, and swallows, before speaking. ‘I’ll never forget the day you arrived, sorrowful little dote that you were.’ She tears off a piece of toast and dunks it into her teacup, sucks it, and swallows, every movement slow, while her eyes dart back to Roisin and then fix on something in the distance. ‘Anyway, that’s a long time ago now, and that’s the whole of it so far as I know it, so it’s no use asking questions.’ She lifts her cup, drinks, then places it back in its saucer with an air of finality.

  ‘So my mother – my birth mother – is she still alive?’

  ‘God only knows, child. What’s brought all this on?’

  Roisin pushes the newspaper across to Nanny. ‘It’s talking about a body being found in England. It says it’s the boy who kidnapped a little girl, called Rosie. And there’s a photo of her, look.’

  Nanny is rigid, staring at the photograph.

  ‘Nanny?’

  ‘What? Oh, I’m thinking, I do remember something about… where did you find it?’

  ‘It was in Daddy’s drawer. When he spoke to me last, he said, “Your name is Rosie”, and said I should find my mother, in England. Nanny, is this anything to do with that?’

  ‘Goodness no, child. That’s just an old bit of newspaper.’ She taps the photograph. ‘Surely, you aren’t thinking the child looks like you? Will you look at her? Look at that hair.’ She drops the remaining slice of toast onto Roisin’s plate. ‘Will you get some breakfast down you? And are you going to school today?’

  ‘I’ve got the week off, compassionate-something. Nanny, where are my photographs? From when I was small?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if I kept any.’

  ‘My school photographs? You didn’t keep them?’

  ‘Let me think… Maybe there are some. I’ll have a look, later.’ Nanny presses her hands on the table to push herself up from her chair and busies herself clearing the pots away.

  ‘It’s just that… I found something on the internet, and there was a child called Rosie who was kidnapped from a place called Sheffield, about the time you told me I arrived here.’

  Nanny turns on the tap, moves cups and saucers around noisily. ‘Is that the truth now? Well, it’s a coincidence, you can be sure.’

  Roisin wants to believe her. From the article she found in the drawer, she had linked back through Google to get to the archives of several newspapers. She knows the story of a little girl called Rosie Endleby, who was taken hostage during a robbery thirteen years ago; she’s read the string of articles about the search for the child. It’s not me, she thinks. It’s a terrible story, but like Nanny says, it’s a coincidence. Surely, Nanny would know if it were true. But Roisin keeps coming back to the photograph of the mother. She has no memory of ever knowing anyone with hair like that, grey with the pale-pink scalp showing through; this woman looks old, worn out; but there’s something in those eyes as they look straight at her through the screen of her laptop, that gives her gooseflesh. The article is dated a couple of weeks ago. The headline says:

  Mother of missing toddler, Rosie, critical following overdose, and underneath: Neighbours said tragic Jennifer became depressed and took an overdose on the eighteenth birthday of her daughter, Rosie, who was kidnapped thirteen years ago. Jennifer is in intensive care.

  4

  Roisin downloads all the newspaper reports and the news videos that she can find on the internet. There’s a memorial page on Facebook, with a photo of the little girl, with Bring Rosie Back written across it, and it’s got over half a million shares, it’s been all over the world, going around and around, for years. It’s creepy for sure, especially when she comes to the photo of this child as she might look now. The skin on the back of her neck tingles as she looks into the eyes, and the chin with the little dimple in it. But this girl’s hair is long and curly, and a kind of gingery blonde, whereas Roisin’s is so white no one can believe it’s natural; and straight, and very short, in what Pauline, who does the mobile hairdressing, calls a pixie cut. She thinks, it’s a me-not-me, this girl, it’s like a relative, somebody who shares a gene pool with me, and that’s it. Perhaps that’s what Daddy was trying to tell her; that something bad had happened to a relative. A person in her mother’s family, a cousin, for instance. No, there’s nothing here that makes any sense. After all, wouldn’t she have memories, if she was four, just a week from being five, when all this is supposed to have happened? Which is another thing. Daddy had been in England for five years; she was four and a bit years old when he brought her home. Her birthday is July fifteenth, the same birthday as Grandpappy who she didn’t know because he passed away before she got here. This Rosie in the news would have been eighteen a couple of weeks ago, because, like it says in the paper, the girl’s mammy took an overdose on her eighteenth birthday. Whereas Roisin won’t be eighteen until next July.

  She presses her fingers on her eyelids to concentrate, bringing pictures into her mind of all the things she remembers from being little. Her earliest memory is of being warm and snuggled up, with the smell of the fire which she now knows is from peat and wood; of watching the pictures in the fire as it burns, while Daddy reads her a story. Actually, that might not be the first. She remembers sitting on the back of a sheep, its curly wool scratchy in her fingers, slipping first one way, then another, but not falling off, as Daddy walked them across the yard. Nanny didn’t have a camera, and she wouldn’t let people take photographs of any of them. Roisin got a school photo every year, and it went on the press for a while, then it disappeared. She asked Daddy once where they went, these photos, and he said he kept them in his secret box with his treasure. Since the funeral, Roisin has looked, but she hasn’t found anything in his room except for the newspaper article in his drawer. She must ask Nanny again, to look for them, they will be somewhere. School, friends, the farm… That’s her life. Nanny, Daddy, Aodhan, Aunt Anne Marie and Uncle Niall. That’s her family.

  Once, when she was in primary school she went home with Clodagh for tea. Clodagh’s mammy asked her lots of questions: where was her mammy? In England. Did she see her? No. Why not? Because her daddy looked after her. And so on. Before that day, she never thought there was anything unusual about not having a mammy living with her. Later, she repeated the questions to her daddy. He said she didn’t need to know anything except he came and took her when her mammy could no longer look after her; and that being with him and Nanny was far better than being with her mammy, and she was not to worry about it. And she hadn’t, until last year, when they were studying genetics at school. They were discussing diseases and conditions and so on that might be inherited. Roisin asked Nanny who said there was nothing for her to be afraid of; and she asked Daddy about her mammy’s family. He said he didn’t know of anything, but then he hadn’t known her for very long. She teased him; asked if she’d been a one-night stand. He said, well, it wasn’t serious, and eventually admitted they met in a club and it was by chance, years later, that he heard she’d had a child, and went back and found she’d not been looking after her, so he brought her to Ireland.

  She asked, ‘Why don’t I remember her?’

  ‘Probably because it wasn’t very nice, back then, and you were happy, when we got here. The good memories might have cancelled out the bad memories.’

  ‘Does she know where I am?’

  ‘No, we thought it best to make a clean break.’

  Now, she asks Nanny, ‘Do I take after Daddy at all?’

  ‘Well, now, let me think. You don’t look like him, but I expect you favour your mammy. After all, you spent nearly four years with her, that would be inevitable. I dread to think what might have happened in those years, but you were terrified of bangs and sudden noises when you were wee, a
nd we had the devil’s own job to persuade you to get in the car.’ Nanny chuckles and spreads her arms wide. ‘Aye, you’d stick out your arms and legs, so you couldn’t be put through the door.’ She shakes her head and goes back to her crocheting. ‘But as you grew up, you took after your daddy more and more. Everything he did, you were on his heels, following him, copying him. If he had ketchup on his chips, you’d have half the bottle. You’d only drink tea, because that’s what he drank, and always with the two spoons of sugar.’

  ‘Did you ever think, Nanny, that I wasn’t his? That what he said about my mammy wasn’t true?’

  ‘No, I never did.’

  This is starting to feel like a puzzle her daddy has set for her, to trace a family that’s linked to her in some vague way, and she needs to find out how. She tries again to talk to Nanny. She shows her the Facebook page.

  Nanny fiddles about, cleaning her glasses, puts them on and glances at the screen. ‘You know I can’t do computers, Roisin.’

  ‘This little girl who went missing, she has a mammy, and a daddy, and a big brother. I wonder what it was like for him, his sister being kidnapped and never found. Nanny, are you crying?’

  Nanny sniffs and pulls her hankie from her sleeve. ‘That’s a terrible sad story you’re telling, Roisin.’ She stands up and busies herself switching the kettle on, keeping her hand on it as though that will hurry it up, then refilling the teapot, and pouring them both a fresh cup. She wraps her hands around her own cup and carries it across to the window.

  Roisin joins her, watching the wind scudding the leaves around the yard. The freezing rain has given way to a late-afternoon sun which shines low, across the yard, making the fallen leaves glisten gold and red. It’s her daddy’s favourite time of year. He used to say it was this weather, the middle of autumn, when he came home after being some years in England, that made him fall in love with the place all over again; and then he wondered how he’d ever been able to leave it; and how he’d managed to stay away all those years. Except I got you, in England, he’d say, so it was all worth it. Roisin has never known anywhere else. Sure, she’s never been further than Kilkenny in her… she stops that thought because Nanny just said Daddy brought her from England. Her stomach flutters with panic as she thinks about going away from here. Her teachers have told her she’s good enough for university, and even the thought of going to Dublin is scary. She realises that although her Nanny is telling her it’s all a coincidence, she’s starting to believe there’s something to it. Certainly, enough to want to find out more. The thought of having another life, in a different country, is terrifying, but also exciting…

  Roisin leaves Nanny at the window and sits at the table, opening her laptop and bringing up one of the articles. It’s dated 2006, with the mother and father at a press conference. The father stares at the camera, and Roisin feels his anger spilling down the years into Nanny’s parlour. The mother’s eyes stare ahead, blank, expressionless. She reminds Roisin of a boy at primary school, who had no use of his facial muscles, and it was hard for anyone to know what he thought. That’s what Rosie’s mother looks like, as though she’s lost the use of her facial muscles and will never smile or frown or laugh again. She scrolls down until she finds the photograph of the little girl, and another, of a little boy; they look like twins.

  A short, sharp burst of breath behind her makes her turn to find Nanny staring past her, at the screen, with a hand over her chest. The colour has dropped from her face and her eyes roll up into her head.

  ‘Poor wee dote,’ she says. ‘Mary forgive us.’

  As Roisin stands up from her chair, and turns, with one hand on the table, Nanny stumbles, and Roisin puts out an arm and helps her to the sofa.

  5

  They agree they definitely won’t tell Anne Marie the real reason Roisin is going to England. Nanny says that would be tantamount to putting it in the local newspaper and having it broadcast across the county. And Roisin couldn’t bear the gloating, of Anne Marie jumping to the end of the story before she properly knew the beginning, saying, didn’t I tell you so? He was a bad one and haven’t I always warned you? There is probably nothing Anne Marie would enjoy more than thinking Roisin is no blood relative of theirs. She would be absolutely delighted and would be boasting about Aodhan being the only one in line to inherit the farm – if they could stop Nanny selling it, that is. No, they’ve told Anne Marie the same as everybody else – that Roisin is going to England to visit a friend of her daddy’s, from when he lived there, who’s invited her over for old times’ sake.

  Roisin pauses in her packing when Nanny comes into her room with two mugs of tea and perches on the bed. Roisin climbs onto the bed and sits with her back against the headboard. Both wrap their hands tightly around their drinks as if that will give them comfort. Like those cold evenings, when Nanny would bring in a hot drink and perch on the bed, relating a story. Roisin’s favourite was always the one about Fionn mac Cumhaill, who was challenged to a fight by the Scottish giant Benandonner, so he built the giant’s causeway where they could meet and fight. Roisin let Nanny carry on telling the story long after she learned that the causeway was a volcanic eruption, because she liked the feel of it: the story of the giant defending Ireland felt like Nanny, keeping them safe on the farm. Such as when Nanny put a padlock on the gate and shut off the footpath that led through the meadow; she fixed barbed wire across it until the hawthorn bushes she’d planted grew big enough to make sure nobody could get through. Who wants strangers wandering around when you’ve little children running free, you never know who’s wandering about, she’d say, and nobody challenged her. Nanny was well respected in the village.

  Roisin wishes she could climb under the eiderdown and go back in time to that warm place where everything smells of peat and wood and damp wool. It isn’t going to happen. Her daddy has set her off on a road where there is no stopping and no turning back. She knows now what people mean when they say something would rock your world. Her world is having a volcanic eruption that is opening up a causeway leading to people and places she can’t imagine.

  ‘You know I’ve got to go, don’t you, Nanny?’

  ‘No, Roisin, you don’t have to go.’ She pats Roisin’s arm. ‘There may be a lot of unhappiness at the end of this and you don’t have to go looking for it.’

  ‘But I do, don’t you see?’

  ‘No. Sometimes it doesn’t help to go poking into the past. Have you not been happy here? Did we not give you a good life, your daddy and me?’

  ‘Oh, Nanny, you know I have, you did. That’s not it.’ Roisin wraps an arm around Nanny’s thin shoulders. Nanny stands up, letting it fall back on the pillow.

  ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘Course I will, Nanny.’ She means it. This is her family, this is home. She pulls Soggy Doggy from beneath her pillow. ‘I’ll leave him here, so you can be sure I will.’

  Nanny smiles as she gathers up the blue cable sweater sitting on top of Roisin’s open backpack and presses it against her face. Since the funeral, Nanny has been shrinking. She always seemed strong, unbendable, and now she looks as though a sudden wind might blow her over. Roisin takes the sweater from her hands, gently, tucks it into the backpack, and pulls the cord to close it.

  Nanny shakes her head, takes the empty mugs in one hand, stops with the other hand reaching for the door. ‘What I wanted to say is… Well, it’s this: you must know that you saved his life. Little mite that you were. However it was that you came into his life, you saved it. I know’ – she wags a finger at the laptop which is resting on the bedspread, as though it’s Roisin’s daddy sitting there – ‘there was a time when he had the devil in him. Who knows what he got up to, in that godforsaken country. But then he got you. And he brought you into our lives.’ She pauses, looking into the middle distance, then shakes her head again. ‘He’d have been dead within the year. So thin and sick he was when he came home… he looked like one of those survivors from the concentration camps that you see on T
V. Aye, you saved his life all right. And he thought the world of you.’

  Roisin jumps up and pulls her into a hug, pressing the mugs in Nanny’s hand into their stomachs. ‘I know that, Nanny, and I wish I could leave it be, but I have to do this.’

  Nanny’s head drops almost onto her chest as she turns away and Roisin listens to the back of her slippers flapping against her heels as she goes down the stairs.

  6

  It’s still dark when Roisin comes downstairs in the morning. She peeks into Nanny’s bedroom, but the bed is empty, and so is the kitchen. She’ll be feeding the calves, saying goodbye to them, too, because Seamus Lewis is collecting them later this morning, taking them to market, for Nanny can’t manage the animals on her own. Roisin keeps glancing out of the kitchen window, while she’s making and eating her toast and tea, but there’s no sign of her. When Niall drives into the yard, she doesn’t appear. Roisin takes a few steps towards the calf shed, hesitates: would Nanny want her to see her, upset? She watches the shed door for half a minute, looks at Niall tapping the steering wheel, and decides Nanny must not want to see her leave. She’ll be back, soon.

  On the drive to Kilkenny, Roisin feels full to bursting with the enormity of what she is doing, with the doubts and the hopes, and all the time, bubbling underneath, is the panic that makes the taste of her toast rise in her throat. She is desperate to talk to somebody, and Niall is here, but what if he told Anne Marie? Although, thinking about it, Roisin might be able to trust him. Last year, she went with Ruari at the dance. Niall was due to pick her up and take her home. He saw them, as he drove into the square, but he sat and waited, with his lights off. He never said a word, until they got to the farm, when he said, If you should want to go into town of a Saturday night, Roisin, I’d be glad to give you a lift. As much as saying he’d help her to see Ruari in secret. But she didn’t take him up on it. Her daddy was bound to find out, sooner or later, and he was fierce when it came to even the possibility of her dating. No, she didn’t think enough of Ruari to risk Daddy getting angry. But it made her think that Niall can probably keep a secret. He senses her staring and looks at her out of the sides of his eyes, smiles.