It Could Never Happen Here, page 29
She held out hope as she checked the staff location planner, told Mairead she had to head into town on urgent business, and drove down to the hardware shop on Cooney Pier. It was possible, she told herself as she tapped on the steering wheel, waiting for the caretaker to appear, that Arlo had put two and two together and come up with the most unsavoury number.
But in her heart of hearts, something about it rang true.
Seamus’s van pulled in about three cars down and Nuala hopped out. The caretaker had just shut his own door when he clocked the principal heading towards him. He was carrying a large empty paint tin and splattered crowbar.
‘Everything all right?’
‘I need to speak to you.’
Seamus kept his eyes on her as he locked the van. ‘Beverley finally signed off on a yellow-enough yellow for the brick road, so I’m just picking up another couple of tins for the final coat.’ She must have looked how she felt because the man stuffed his keys into his pockets and, face sombre, stepped away from the road and into the narrow laneway between the hardware shop and the credit union. He placed the crowbar and tin at his feet. ‘Everything all right, Nuala?’ he asked again.
Her plan had been to tell him what was alleged and to ask if it was true. But now that she was here, and she was regarding him in a whole new light, she abandoned that tack, and went instead with foregone conclusion.
She told the caretaker that she knew what had been going on. She made it sound like several concrete sources had come to her, as opposed to one uncertain teenager, and she put forward the extrapolations as facts. They knew he had been messaging Woody and befriending him under a pseudonym; they knew he had blackmailed the child; they knew he had instructed him to pose nude and to use that image to solicit similar photos from the female students in his class; and they knew the photos were being sent on to Seamus for God knows what purpose.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Like I said, several people.’
A woman with a buggy passed about five feet from them and Seamus turned away from the road. ‘Was it Frank Cafferty?’
‘I’m not naming names, Seamus.’
The caretaker’s temper flared. ‘It was, wasn’t it? You can’t believe him. He’s a fairy, Nuala. Did you know that about him?’
Nuala had been hoping for speechless shock, extreme outrage, dogged denial. Even a threat to sue her for slander would have been welcome. If his aim was to come across as innocent, his focus was in the wrong place.
‘He might think he saw me printing out certain photos, but he’s wrong,’ Seamus continued, his face red. ‘He was too far away. He couldn’t have seen anything. He’s let his imagination run away with him. That lot often do. It’s for the best he’s leaving, if he’s going to spread such awful rumours as that.’
‘Mr Cafferty never told me anything.’ The sixth-class teacher had handed in his resignation that morning but she had yet to accept it. ‘Though I do also know you were instructing the boy to make his life difficult. I believe you gave Woody the teacher’s mobile phone number. And you told him to write “pedo” on his coat.’
‘I never – I – I never …’ Seamus’s foot started tapping the damp concrete. He took another couple of glances over his shoulder. ‘Prove it,’ he said suddenly, defiantly. ‘Do you have proof?’
Not ‘You don’t have proof’ or ‘You couldn’t possibly have proof because it’s not true’ but ‘Do you have proof?’. A self-incriminating question.
‘I stopped by your workroom before coming here. I was looking at your framed cards over the kitchen counter.’
‘My baseball card collection. So?’
‘Babe Ruth,’ she all but spat, finding it difficult to look at the man that she had thought was an ally at least, but often a friend. She’d never noticed the cards before and wouldn’t have if Arlo hadn’t mentioned them. ‘I trusted you. I gave you a job and I confided in you. I would have trusted you with anything at this school. Our students, Seamus? It’s …’ She flinched. ‘You disgust me.’
His foot stopped tapping. His body slumped. His whole demeanour changed.
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I didn’t hurt anyone. I never touched Woody or any other child. It was all harmless, a sort of joke.’
‘A joke? Naked images of our students are a joke?’
‘No, not a joke. But they weren’t … I wasn’t … I didn’t do anything with them. They were only for my use. I printed them off and that was it. I’m rubbish with technology. I didn’t upload them to the internet or anything like that. I just … There’s something wrong with me, I can’t help it, I know it’s not right, but—’
‘Enough!’ she spat. Even the idea of the photos made her feel physically ill. She did not need to know what went through Seamus’s mind when he looked at them. ‘You’re gone, Seamus.’
‘Please, Nuala, no; you can’t fire me. I love this job. What would you do without me? Who would build the sets? Opening night is tomorrow and—’
‘Of course you’re fired! That’s the least of it. I’m going to the guards.’
All anger gone from him now, his face drained to white. ‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No, no, no, please, please, don’t do that. Don’t tell anyone. My wife – she wouldn’t – it would kill her, and my sister … I couldn’castt handle it – all our neighbours, my friends. Oh God. You can’t …’
‘I trusted you – with my school, with my students!’
‘No, no. I’ll … You can’t. Please. My wife has a bad heart, you know that. She couldn’t … The neighbours. She couldn’t stand them all talking. I couldn’t stand it. You know this place, everyone would know, and they wouldn’t even care about the truth, I’d never be allowed to explain my side!’
A heat began to rise. The flames started in her diaphragm and whooshed into her chest, her shoulders, up into her head. Her gaze fell on the items at Seamus’s feet. It would be so simple to lift up the crowbar, to swing for the man in his flummoxed, panicked state and send it flying on to the side of his head.
‘Please, Nuala. It would kill me.’
She felt her hand relinquishing her waist, reaching down. It was not something she would have thought herself capable of, but now it seemed perfectly reasonable. None of us know the extent of our abilities, until we are pushed to the limit.
..................
‘Jesus Christ, Nuala! I was tempted to kill him myself this morning but come on – what were you thinking?!’
‘Oh relax, Beverley,’ the principal snapped. ‘I didn’t bludgeon the bastard! I just contemplated it. I’m only telling you what I was thinking, not what I did.’
‘Well, it sounded very convincing from where I was standing.’
‘So, what did you do?’ asked Arlo, keen to bring this whole thing to a conclusion and get out of here. Nuala had put some sort of baking paper over the small window in the door, but any parent or teacher could easily walk in on them, looking for Seamus to help with some staging issue. Christine Maguire was still standing against the back wall. They’d given her a summary of what was going on and she looked mildly ill. Already far too many people knew. Now they’d thrown a journalist into the mix.
He returned his attention to the woman he’d once thought of as a sort of second mother and asked, yet again: ‘Where is Seamus?’
‘He’s gone to the guards,’ replied Nuala. ‘I told him I was going to Aberstown Station and he begged me to let him do it.’
‘So he’s gone by himself? You just took his word for it?’ came a voice, Christine’s, from the back of the room. ‘What if he makes a run for it?’
‘He won’t.’
‘Because he’s such an upstanding, trustworthy member of society?’
‘Where would he go? And even if he did do a legger, what then? He knows I’d go to the guards and they’d find him eventually.’
‘Why are we getting the police involved?’ demanded Beverley. ‘If the police know, there’ll be a full investigation and then everyone in town will know where the children’s naked photos really ended up. What good is that going to do anyone?’
‘Of course the police have to know,’ said Christine.
‘Easy for you to say,’ Beverley shot back. ‘Your daughter wasn’t caught up in this thing. How do you think Amelia is going to feel when she finds out the image she thought she was sending to a boy in her class was actually going to a near sixty-year-old man who she thought was an adult she could trust? She’ll be scarred for life!’
‘If there was another way, I’d have taken it,’ began Nuala.
‘Of course there was another way!’
‘What were you planning to do, Beverley? Hmm? Kill him?’
‘I was going to record a confession,’ the woman retorted, waving her phone at the principal, ‘and use it as blackmail. I was going to run him out of town and ensure he never came back.’
‘Oh yes. So just make him someone else’s problem?’
‘Rather that than it being our children’s problem.’
Arlo wasn’t particularly thrilled about the guards getting involved either – he didn’t want Woody to know who he’d really been sending the photos to and, once they knew his brother was being blackmailed, they’d want to know what information ‘Babe Ruth’ had on Woody and his family. None of them wanted the investigation into the crash resurfacing.
‘When did he say he was going to the guards?’ he asked.
‘Right after I spoke to him,’ said Nuala. ‘Around two p.m., I’d say. I watched him jump in his van and go.’
They all glanced towards the clock.
‘And have you heard from the guards yet?’ asked Christine.
‘No,’ conceded Nuala. ‘But I’m sure I will …’
Beverley guffawed.
And then, right on cue, the unmistakable wail of a siren began to gather in the distance.
40
••••••
‘Nuala.’ Sergeant Whelan was striding down the corridor, hat hanging from his left hand, and his shirt its usual amount of crumpled.
She raised her hand in greeting, turning once to check the others had obeyed her request and were staying put in the workroom. Of course, there was a good chance Sergeant Whelan would want to inspect the workroom, lest it contained some sort of evidence.
‘I’m here to see if the school might have a phone number on record. One for Miriam McGrath.’
‘Miriam,’ repeated Nuala. It made sense they’d want to speak to the wife, but surely Seamus could have given them that. ‘Seamus’s Miriam?’
The sergeant nodded. ‘We swung by the house but she’s not in.’
‘Doesn’t Seamus have a number for her?’
He gave her a peculiar look then he dropped his eyes and fed the rim of his hat through his hands. ‘I’m afraid Seamus is the reason we’re looking to contact her.’
Nuala nodded, not quite getting what the problem was. If Seamus was in custody then surely they could just ask for the number, or take his phone and retrieve it if he wouldn’t oblige.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of tragic news, Nuala, I know you two were close, but Seamus is dead. His body has just been taken out of the Gorm.’
‘His … He’s dead?’
The sergeant nodded. ‘We’ve just come from the scene. Pathology are working on an initial assessment now, but his car was spotted out near the bridge on the edge of town about 4 p.m. He must have gone in then …’
Nuala’s head was shaking, while Sergeant Whelan’s was nodding. ‘Was it …?’ she began.
‘We don’t know what happened. We’re investigating. Foul play looks unlikely and it’s possible he fell, it is windy this evening, but it wouldn’t be that easy to fall …’ He caught her eye in a way that confirmed the guard’s suspicion but didn’t force him to speak ill of the dead. It was a lot more noble to have fallen than to have jumped.
Nuala thought back on her conversation with Seamus, on how sure he’d been that he should go to the station alone, and how incapable he’d been of accepting a reality in which he would be known as the man who had done such a terrible thing.
‘I should clear the school,’ she said, thinking aloud.
‘It’s not strictly necessary …’
‘We won’t be doing the musical now. We can hardly open a show the day after the set builder has died, can we?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I’ll get you that number from my office,’ she said, as she turned and started walking, the sergeant following after her. She glanced in through the double-door windows as they passed the auditorium. ‘Then I’ll send them all home.’
‘You don’t have any idea why he might have done this to himself, do you?’
Nuala paused at her office door. This was the moment. This was the point at which she should tell the gardaí exactly what she had been planning to tell them a few hours earlier – she should tell them the very things Seamus had promised to relay before he took the easy way out. But she thought of the others in the workroom, about what it would do to Woody, and the other children, and all their families. What good would it do them to know where their photographs had really ended up? What purpose could it possibly serve now that the person who needed to be punished was no more? What would be the benefit in punishing everyone else instead?
‘If he did do it,’ the sergeant added. ‘Hypothetically.’
‘Not an idea,’ she said, holding the sergeant’s gaze so firmly she almost believed herself. ‘I am as shocked as it is possible to be.’
41
••••••
ABERSTOWN GARDA STATION
‘That was Sergeant Mick Mulhern from Cork City forensics,’ said Whelan, having hung up the receiver and studied it for a good three seconds.
Joey nodded, hands instinctively going to his belt and hoisting it up.
‘He was calling about our DOA …’
‘Yes, Sergeant,’ replied Joey, desperate for any information he didn’t already have.
‘… Seamus McGrath.’
Joey waited.
The sergeant sighed.
Joey waited some more.
‘Yah.’
He was doing it on purpose.
Joey forced his hands away from his belt and did his best to look relaxed. Tell me, don’t tell, it’s all the same to me.
He had barely finished thinking this mantra when he was opening his mouth to beg for information. But the sergeant got in just ahead.
‘They found a suicide note, in the car. They’re sending it through to us now.’
Joey clamped his mouth shut. His hands flew back to his belt. He was ready for action.
‘It’s short. Addressed to his wife and scrawled on the back of a discarded envelope which, judging by the footprints, had been sitting on the floor of his car for a while. It was the only thing he had to hand, I suppose, but that suggests it wasn’t premeditated; that he hadn’t gotten up that morning intending to take his own life.’
‘What did the note say?’
‘I’m sorry to leave you. Please forgive me. I didn’t mean any harm.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’ The sergeant made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl. ‘Didn’t mean any harm … in topping himself? Scant comfort that’ll be to his missis, all alone in that house now. She’s the nervy type, you know. Doesn’t seem to have much of a life, no real friends, doesn’t even appear to have full access to their bank accounts. When I was out there today, she told me he couldn’t swim.’
‘Oh,’ said Joey.
‘Never learned. She bought him lessons when they first got married, but he didn’t go. Too proud, I suppose.’
‘So that’s why he threw himself in the river? He knew he’d have no way out?’
‘Suppose so,’ said the sergeant, groaning as he stood from the chair again. ‘I guess I’m heading back out to Cooney, amn’t I? I’d almost rather be telling her he was pushed. You’d be less likely to take that personally. Can you hang on a few more minutes until Corrigan comes on shift?’
Joey nodded as his superior removed his hat and coat from the stand once again.
‘And Delaney?’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Put your last few minutes to good use.’
‘Yes, Sergeant. Whatever you need.’
‘Get a screwdriver from the back office and put another notch in your belt. All day those goddam trousers have been falling down.’
..................
Arlo Whitehead, temporary employee
I was working with Seamus for the past couple of weeks. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I can’t think of a single reason he might have jumped, or a reason he might have been pushed. He was a very popular man. As far as I know, nobody had a bad word to say about him. Has anyone said a bad word about him?
Beverley Franklin, parent
The last thing he said to me? Mmm ... Oh, yes. He apologised for messing up the paint on the Yellow Brick Road so many times. That was it. He said I was right, and he was wrong and that the colour hadn’t been correct, but now it was. I thanked him for the apology and for all his work. We parted on excellent terms.
Christine Maguire, parent
I went looking for him in his workshop yesterday evening, yes. It was for an article I was planning to write on the musical. But he wasn’castt there. A few people were looking for him. Which just shows you how valued a member of our community he was. Drownings are so tragic. Poor Seamus. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer man.
42
••••••
Christine Maguirepiled costume fabric into her boot as the wind continued to howl. The parents had all left the hall on Principal Patterson’s instruction and, around her, they were clambering into their own cars. She saw Beverley approaching from a couple of metres away.
