1
2017
Three months before the killings I returned to Thornbury. Chance took me back, a set of unpremeditated circumstances, although in many ways it felt inevitable. It had been over twenty years since I had last set foot in the place, but in all that time, the house and the grounds around it had occupied a singular space in my memory, a bright pocket filled with summer grass and lofty ceilings, laughter, music and self-discovery. Despite all that happened there, I still retained the sense that I owed something of myself, of the person that I had become, to that house, and those who lived there.
We had been called down to cover a scene in a farmhouse outside Borris – a quaint village near the Carlow‒Kilkenny border. It appeared to be a murder-suicide attempt, and the poor bastard had made a hash of it. By the time the team got there, he and his wife were already in Waterford Regional Hospital, fighting for their lives or whatever was left of them. The local sergeant, a Roman-nosed depressive who looked as much like a farmer as he did a representative of the law, was a man named Savage, and he stood to one side, watching, while I and the others tiptoed over the scene in the small hours of the morning, fingerprinting, taking samples, documenting the whole sorry mess. One of my colleagues recorded what he saw with a drawling monotone into a Dictaphone, while I struggled with the light and remounted one flash after another in my search for the right exposure and a maximum depth of field.
Both victims had been at the kitchen table when the gun was fired. The blood had mostly seeped into the woodwork by the time we arrived, but there was still a slow drip on to the floor beneath. Sheets of newspaper were inexplicably covering the ground and it was the pat-pat of blood meeting paper – not the suicide attempt – which made me think of Thornbury and what had happened that summer all those years ago. I remembered we had gone hunting and two of us – Rachel and Marcus – had killed rabbits. They had hung the rabbits from a hook in the scullery. There was paper on the counter beneath, and that same pat-pat of blood dripping down came to me now as it did when I was fifteen years old.
‘We’re not far from Thornbury, are we?’ I asked Savage as we were packing up our things. It was still early, not yet nine, but the sun had broken clear of the clouds and it felt warm for a morning in April.
Savage’s mouth puckered with consideration. ‘Thornbury,’ he said, glancing down at the scuffed surface of his old brogues, enunciating the estate’s name as if it were one he had not heard in some time. ‘You know it, do you?’
‘I used to know people who lived there.’
‘The Bagenals?’ he said, his interest piqued now.
‘I went to school with Rachel and Patrick,’ I said, before asking breezily: ‘Do you know if anyone’s still living there?’
‘The son is still running the place, so I believe. Don’t know about the sister. Mrs Bagenal died some years back. Nice woman. Brain tumour, God love her.’
‘Yes, I had heard that.’
‘And then the father … Well.’ He looked at me then, an up-and-down assessment, so that I couldn’t help but feel that he was judging me, fitting me into whatever it was he knew of the Bagenals’ troubled history. ‘He died a long time ago.’
Neither of us spoke for a minute, Savage leaning down to rub a crumb of muck from his shoe with a stick he had picked up off the ground.
‘You could drop in on your way back to Dublin,’ he remarked. ‘It wouldn’t be much of a detour,’ and proceeded with a detailed itinerary of the minor roads that led to the estate. I didn’t comment, and if he saw the sudden change in my demeanour – nerves rushing to the surface – he didn’t comment.
His farewell to me was delivered in a deadpan tone:
‘Mind yourself,’ he said.
I did not intend going back. To this day, I’m not sure why I did. A seed of curiosity planted by Savage’s suggestion, perhaps, but that alone could not have been enough to drive me back to a place I had once sworn off for ever. The challenge of it rose in my mind as I drove alone through roads flanked with cow parsley and gorse, one eye on the satnav, nervy at the knowledge that the house was close by; niggled by the sense that I should test myself by just taking a quick look, to see if it still held the same power over me that I remembered as a girl. It had been so long. Rachel and I had lost touch years ago. I’d heard she was living in London. It wasn’t difficult for me to picture her married to a stockbroker – a rich divorcé – living in Kensington or Primrose Hill, childless from what I had heard. Patrick, I knew, had taken over the running of the estate while the rest of his peers were at university, and even though our paths hadn’t crossed since leaving school, I was still curious about him and Rachel, about the house.
The estate, though large, was well off the beaten track, and by the time I found the old granite pillars that marked the entrance it was getting on in the day, and I needed to get back to HQ. Still, I had come too close not to take a quick look. The memory of the warm yellow stone crawling with ancient wisteria and roses, those gracious rooms beyond, lured me nervously through the gateless pillars against my better judgement, along the curving road, tussocky grass growing in a furrow along the centre.
My first clue all was not well was the sight of a car that appeared to have been driven off the avenue and into a shallow ditch. It was an old VW Golf whose registration plates and wheels had been removed. The bonnet was buckled and twisted where it met with the wide solid trunk of an old beech tree. Weeds grew within the car’s interior, visible through the passenger door, which was slightly ajar. The windows remained intact but were smudged with moss and sap and the littered seed from overhanging branches. I slowed to survey the scene, before continuing past the overgrown rhododendrons to where the avenue rounded on to the front garden leading up to the house.
What I remembered of the front lawn was a clipped expanse of grass rolling down to the driveway, and a striped marquee pinned to the ground in front of the house for Patrick’s party. What a shock it was now to turn the corner and find the grass grown coarse and long, balding in places. An ugly fence had been erected around the perimeter as if at one stage livestock had been grazing here. But worse than that was the state of the house beyond. The sash windows with their bevelled-glass panes twinkling in the sun were sagging and cracked, paint peeling off their frames. In some cases, the glass had been removed and the gaps patched up with plywood. Ivy had grown thick and wild across one side of the house, hanging low over the windows or shorn back sharply over others, as if someone had made an effort to clip it back but then lost interest and given up. There was still beauty in the tangled rose that was just coming into bloom over the south-west corner of the house, and the contours of the building retained something of their former majesty and grandeur. And yet it felt, as I pulled the car up in front of the main entrance, that the house was slowly surrendering to decay. I had a flash of Mrs Bagenal – Rachel and Patrick’s mother – her elegant hands and neatly set hair, standing proudly at the door to welcome her guests, and wondered how she might have felt had she lived to see its fallen state.
For a moment I sat there, prevaricating, a voice in the back of my mind instructing me to turn the car around and drive out of there. But instead I got out, an ache of tiredness in my legs and across my back, squinted up at the house, and thought I saw movement at one of the upper windows. For one loopy moment, I was sure the window was leaning precariously down from the frame, poised to drop and smash on the gravel below. But then my vision cleared, and the house righted itself as I blinked up at it. I told myself not to worry, that it was the result of too little sleep, and too much work, the drive down in the early hours conspiring to summon up strange images.
The front door opened, and a dog came bounding towards me – a red setter, ears flying back – a voice shouting after to heel. I leaned down to stroke the dog’s head, and it flopped back on to the ground, displaying its tummy.
‘Don’t mind Jinny,’ Patrick said, stepping over the threshold. ‘She’s a dreadful slut.’ He was coming towards me now. I could tell he had not recognized me yet, and it wasn’t until I held out my hand for him to shake that his face cleared in recognition.
‘Lindsey?’ he asked, taking my hand, and half smiling. ‘Is that really you?’
‘Hello, Patrick,’ I replied, nerves prickling all over my body, regretting my decision to come this far.
Patrick shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘My God,’ he said, and there it was again, the rush of the familiar as he stepped back and took me in, asking with a kind of muted but polite astonishment, ‘What brings you back here?’
‘I was in the area, on a job. I had some time to kill, so …’
He blinked and stood back: ‘It’s been years since you’ve been here, an absolute age.’
‘More than twenty years.’
‘Yes, it would be that long, wouldn’t it? I’m looking down the barrel of fifty now.’
This was hardly true – he couldn’t be much past forty. I myself had let that significant birthday pass uncelebrated just a few weeks before. Patrick kept his gaze on me as he spoke, the same lively grey eyes that I remembered, although the face had changed somewhat. Lines around the eyes and a sprinkling of grey in the growth of stubble. His hair, too, although still thick and curly and, for the most part, the same coppery red, was threaded with silver, and he was wearing it a little longer than I remembered. With his faded jeans and a navy fleece that had seen better days, he added to the careworn impression I had of the house.
‘Well, well. Lindsey Morgan on my very doorstep. Who would have believed it?’
For a moment, I’m not sure either of us knew what to say. In an effort, I’m sure, to dispel the awkwardness between us, Patrick invited me inside.
‘You’ll have breakfast?’ he asked.
I declined at first, tried to make my excuses, but he waved away my protestations and ushered me inside.
After the brightness of the morning, the hall, once the door was closed, seemed gloomy and cold.
‘You said you were on a job?’ he asked over his shoulder, as he led me past the staircase with its ancient tiger skin pinned to the wall – a hunting trophy shot by an ancestor in the days of the Raj.
‘Yes. I was called to a crime scene in the area.’
‘You’re with the guards?’ he said with unveiled surprise.
‘Forensics.’
‘Really. So what’s the case? Or can’t you say?’
‘An attempted murder-suicide.’
At first, he said nothing. I wondered if I should have lied, or said something more sensitive. It seemed as though, with those words, I had summoned up the ghosts of both his parents. Neither of us commented on it. The dog’s claws clicked over the floorboards as we followed her down the chilly corridor.
‘There seems to be so much of that about nowadays,’ he said finally as we reached the back of the house, where the rooms were smaller, and the ceilings low. ‘The suicide part, at any rate. You can’t turn on the news nowadays without hearing about it …’
The radio was playing in the background in the kitchen, Patrick’s half-finished breakfast on the table, and I wondered whether he was thinking of his own father as he spoke those words. I felt a stab of regret and wondered why I had come at all. Hardly in the door, and I had put my foot in it. But Patrick welcomed me, nonetheless.
‘Sit, sit,’ he commanded, clearing away some newspapers and files that cluttered the table. ‘Let me cook you up some eggs,’ he said convivially, as if I were a chum he had not seen in a few weeks, and not an old school friend of his sister’s.
‘No, really, Patrick. A cup of tea is fine.’
But he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘By now, I’m a dab hand at whipping up a breakfast fry,’ he said, clattering about with pans on the old Aga. ‘Did you know I ran this place as a guest house for a while?’
‘Really?’
With the smell of frying butter filling the room, he chattered above the spit and crackle of the eggs in the pan, explaining how he had given the hospitality thing a go for a year or so before chucking it in.
‘Too many complaints,’ he explained. ‘The bed’s too hard. The room’s too cold. The house too spooky.’
‘Too spooky?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘It’s a house with a lot of history, as you know,’ Patrick said, sliding the eggs on to a plate and setting them before me with a flourish. ‘Not to mention what they thought of the food.’
‘Looks good to me,’ I answered, suddenly famished, and while I ate, he poured tea and filled me in on the other money-making ventures he had tried: farming, leasing the land to a local farmer, advertising the property as a location for film and television projects, airbnb.
‘The trouble is,’ he explained, ‘there’s barely enough money to be earned from those ventures to keep me going, let alone the house. As you can see, it needs a serious injection of capital.’
I looked around the room – the scuffed wooden countertops, the Victorian tiled floor, the Aga filling the room with heat. There was a fireplace with a little wood-burning stove inset, and a chaise longue had been drawn up next to it. The dog had settled herself on a folded blanket on the floor. The chaise longue I recognized as one that had stood in front of the drawing-room window all those years ago. I had slept on it the night of Peter Bagenal’s death. It had grown shabby with the years, the upholstery worn to the weave. A pillow and blanket were slung in one corner along with a paperback novel, and I wondered did Patrick sleep down here? My mind wandered back to the abandoned car driven into a tree, and I couldn’t help but question the way he was living. The whole expanse of this grand house and how enthralled I had been with the Bagenal family, all of it reduced to a fortyish bachelor son eking out an existence within the confines of a kitchen. It seemed wrong, somehow.
‘Why don’t you sell it?’ I asked, and he shot me a look of amusement.
‘What? Sell the family home? Don’t you understand anything of my tribe?’
This was an old joke from school. I remember the day Rachel gleefully whispered to me that she ‘kicked with the other foot’. I had stared at her, clueless. Our school was predominantly Catholic with only a handful of Church of Ireland pupils. The domain of rich landowners’ children, the sons and daughters of lawyers and bankers, I was the only one in the school to claim a publican as my father.
‘What does Rachel think?’
‘Rachel!’ he spluttered, but his amusement was thin. ‘I’m sure she couldn’t give a hoot what I do with the place. I could put the old pile up on Done Deal and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. So long as her life in London can carry on uninterrupted.’
I suggested he might parcel off some of the land that surrounded the house and try to sell that. It was in the commuter belt, within driving distance of Dublin. Surely he could find a developer who might be interested.
‘Ten years ago, perhaps,’ he answered. ‘Not now, not since the collapse. Developers don’t have the funds and the banks aren’t lending.’
He didn’t appear depressed or gloomy about it, more matter-of-fact, like it was something he had accepted a long time ago.
‘Perhaps I should find myself a wife,’ he said, brightening with amusement at the prospect. ‘That’s what my mother used to advise. A helpmeet to bring this place back to the way it ought to be.’
‘You’d better find a rich wife,’ I remarked, and he laughed and asked me had I any cash?
‘Publican’s daughter? Come on, how about it? You and me,’ he joked, laughter lines wrinkling the sides of his face, and I remembered how I had always enjoyed his flirtatiousness, his easy charm.
‘Do you remember the groomsman’s cottage?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘I’ve been trying to make it habitable. You wouldn’t believe the state it’s been in – the ceiling was nearly collapsing.’
‘What will you do with it?’ I asked, pushing my empty plate aside. ‘Rent it out?’ I couldn’t imagine he’d want to live in it, not after what had happened in the stables next door.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
I pressed him a little more on the subject, but I could feel his reluctance. We talked some more about some of the others from school, about Marcus and Niall and Hilary. I had lost touch with them all. Rachel had been my only real link and, once that had broken, I fell out of contact with the whole gang.
As our conversation petered out, I became aware of the brooding silence of the house around us, and the feeling began nudging at me that I was somehow trespassing. The truth was I was disappointed, even a little sad, at the state of the house. It seemed a lonely place now, neglected, and mired in financial difficulties, not the glittering social hub it had remained in my memory. I looked over again at the unmade couch by the fire, and Patrick followed the movement of my eyes and laughed self-consciously.
‘The place isn’t quite how you remember it, I’m sure.’
Although I made some noises of protest, there was sadness in his smile as he got to his feet. We walked in silence back out to the front door. Rain had begun to fall – a slight drizzle dusting my car as we went outside, the dog lingering on the step.
‘She hates the rain,’ Patrick explained. ‘Not much of a hunting dog, eh?’ He laughed, nudging her with the toe of his boot.
That put me in mind of our weekends again, teenagers hunting rabbits, and I asked him if he still went shooting.
‘Not much.’ He shrugged. ‘Although I’ll have to do something about these crows.’
He looked past me to the trees that lined the avenue and spread around the back of the house. The whole time I was there, I had been aware of a distant blur of noise, and now it crystallized in my consciousness. It was the loud cawing of crows. Looking around, I saw the trees were full of them. The dark shadows I had taken for foliage were actually birds among the branches. There must have been hundreds of them – thousands, maybe. I stood there staring, mesmerized.
‘I might try airbnb again,’ he said with determination. ‘I just think I need some decent photos of the house and the grounds. Market it a bit better, you know?’
I thought of the cheerless rooms we had just left, the abandoned car in the ditch, the pervasive suggestion of the past in every groove of Thornbury’s masonry, the echo of history whispering through its corridors.
He was fishing. I could tell he was, in the same way I could tell his sunny chitchat was really a cover for something far closer to loneliness.
‘I’ll take some photographs for you, if you like. Free of charge,’ I said, looking in my bag for my card, conscious of the colour rising to my cheeks: it’s not, after all, the kind of offer a guard makes. We don’t do nixers. Besides, I wasn’t completely sure I did want to return, and yet the suggestion was mine.
‘You’re very kind, but I couldn’t ask you to.’
‘The offer stands,’ I said, trying to stifle the conflict of emotion within me.
‘If you think you could spare the time, well, then, maybe later in the month, once I’ve cleared things up a little?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
He kissed me on the cheek and stood watching as I got back in the car and drove down the avenue. Out through the pillars, I wondered briefly what had happened to the gates, before finding the road and heading back to the office.
For part of the journey back to Dublin, as fresh air rushed in through the open windows filling up my senses, I allowed myself to fantasize about Patrick and me, running Thornbury together, straightening it out, making it come alive again. A foolish notion, I know. I couldn’t even account for why I had gone back there this morning. It was because of the suicide attempt – they always make me a little down and inward-looking, sending me off into brief but searching examinations of my life and all the things I do not have: a partner, a family of my own, a place to call home.
2
1991
I am constantly watching her. Rachel.
Her head is in a book – Jane Eyre. Her expression is alert, inquisitive, rapt. The train rocks gently from side to side, and it’s hot here in the carriage, despite the open windows. She doesn’t slouch like the rest of us. Not like me, or Hilary who sits beside me in a slump, flicking through Just Seventeen with an air of boredom. Rachel is still wearing her school uniform – only the boys bothered to change. But unlike me and Hilary, she hasn’t loosened her school tie, her collar.
Across from us, Patrick has balled up his jumper and slotted it between his head and the window. Marcus is listening to music – The Cure, most likely – his CD Walkman whirring on the little table. His eyes, smudged with black kohl, are closed, a scattering of pale chest hair showing between the gap in his black denim shirt. Niall drinks from a litre bottle of Cidona, looks around, bored. He’s a sixth-year student – all three of them are. Man-boys, Rachel calls them, with their rugby shoulders. In school, we have little to do with them, being fourth-years.
Niall’s eyes alight on Rachel, her dark brown hair pushed back with a black velvet hairband. He puts the lid of the bottle near the edge of the table then flicks it across the aisle towards her. It pings off her book, and she looks up slowly. Her face is open and clean-looking, as if she’s just scrubbed it with a hot flannel.
‘Stop it,’ she tells him, cool and authoritative.
‘What?’ he asks, all innocent.
‘You’re such a child,’ she breathes, and returns to her book.
I have known her a month and already I am in awe of her.
At the station, a man is there to meet us. A tall, brownish man, leaning against a Nissan Bluebird, arms folded over his chest. Rachel breaks from my side and runs across the road to greet him. She kisses him on the cheek and his arms unfold just long enough for one hand to touch her face. She says something to him, then turns and gestures to me, but I feel shy suddenly, hanging back as the boys and Hilary charge across the road, bags slung over their shoulders. It’s not until they’ve all shaken hands and are flinging their luggage into the boot of the car that I come forward.
‘You must be Lindsey,’ he says, taking my hand. His voice bears no trace of this midland town but is sharp with the same crisp clarity as his daughter’s. The handshake is firm, the skin paper-dry, and for those few seconds he holds me in his gaze. Like Rachel and Patrick, he is tall, imposing. I break his gaze and look down at the asphalt, my ‘Hello, Mr Bagenal’ addressed to the ground.
‘You must call me Peter,’ he says firmly. I think that I will never be able to call him that. But Hilary does.
‘Hello, Peter!’ she calls out, and he wraps an arm around her and kisses the top of her head. But Hilary is Rachel’s cousin, which makes it different for her.
‘Can I drive?’ Patrick asks, and his father throws him the keys.
Peter Bagenal takes the front passenger seat, while the rest of us clamber into the back. Rachel sits between the two boys, and one of us must sit on her lap. As I am the smaller and lighter, Rachel chooses me. Privately, she has joked to me about Hilary’s weight, expressing surprise that a vegetarian could be so fat. Hilary squeezes herself between Marcus and the car door, while I perch on Rachel’s knee.
‘You’re so light!’ she exclaims, and I feel her hands on my hips, the firm strength of her legs beneath me. ‘I wish I were as light as you.’
The car draws away from the kerb and out on to the street, Peter Bagenal issuing instructions to his son in low, steady tones – easy with the clutch, check your mirrors, indicate. The instructions dwindle then cease as we leave the town behind us and the car travels along country roads bound on either side by cow parsley in full bloom, honeysuckle in the hedgerows.
I wonder how long it will take us to get to the house. Thornbury. I haven’t been here before. It’s uncomfortable on Rachel’s knees, my head jammed against the ceiling. I feel too close to Patrick and Peter, bracing myself against the backs of their chairs. I’m worried that the sweat I can feel on my back and under my arms will grow visible through my blouse. Peter reaches forward, takes the cigarette lighter from the dashboard. Cigar smoke fills the car. The skin around Patrick’s neck is mottled, either from heat or nerves. His hair is reddish-brown, a long fringe falling over his eyes, which are fixed on the road ahead. Freckled hands clutch the steering wheel.
Hilary hums to herself, and someone behind me rolls down the window. Marcus. Pale-faced. Boney wrists. Curehead. Clever. One of his parents is German. He was there in Berlin when the wall came down. Rachel says he has a chunk of it in his dorm – a bit of concrete with blue spray-paint on one side. Not that she has seen it. It’s one of the strictest rules of St Alban’s – girls cannot visit the boys’ dorms, and vice versa. The penalty is expulsion.
Peter Bagenal blows smoke towards the windscreen.
‘Sorry,’ I say to Rachel, shifting my weight on her lap. I’m sure her legs must be numb. She squeezes my hips to reassure me. I try to turn back to smile at her, but there isn’t enough room. I catch a glimpse of Niall’s hand clasped around her calf, rubbing. He has worked her sock down to her ankle. I cannot see Rachel’s expression, but her hands remain on my hips while his hand continues to stroke and massage her leg. I catch sight of my face in the rear-view mirror, red with confusion. I feel the squeeze of her hands again, and I know that she is reassuring me about something else this time. About Niall, his hand. It’s another one of Rachel’s jokes. I feel better.
The car slows, then turns through a pair of white wrought-iron gates, and we are suddenly thrown into shade. The coolness of the trees that line the route is a relief, and I find myself looking out eagerly for the house. It takes so long for it to come into view and, when it does, I feel something move in my chest. The house stands clear above a smooth green lawn. It is larger and grander than I had imagined. Warm yellow stone basks in direct sunlight, so many windows glittering. Even high in the roof, I can see circles of glass like a row of eyes peering down from above, and there are statues at intervals along the top of the high wall. An image comes into my head of what it must be like up there – the view over the gardens and trees beyond, how tiny this car must appear as it speeds over the gravel driveway.
A dog has emerged from the house and comes bounding towards us, ears flapping, tongue hanging out, and Peter Bagenal rolls down his window and gives a low chuckle. Patrick slows the car and the dog runs alongside, making occasional leaps towards Peter’s outstretched hand.
Up at the house, the front door opens.
‘There she is,’ Peter says, and he waves: ‘My current wife.’
The boys laugh, and Hilary says, ‘He’s been calling her that for as long as I can remember.’
The gold band he wears on his little finger catches the light.
Heather Bagenal stands in the shadow of the doorway, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. I cannot see her face, only the long yellow sundress, brown slender arms, a scarf wrapped around her hair.
As the car draws to a halt and we all come tumbling out, two things occur to me: first, that I can never ever invite Rachel to my own home, and second, that this house is more beautiful than I had expected. My heart fills up as I take it all in, the house, the yellow sundress, the knotted vines of wisteria twisting around the door, the boys’ laughter, the dog leaping madly. Rachel comes and tucks her arm in mine, and smiles at me in that conspiratorial way she has.
‘Come on,’ she says, and leads me in.
