Finnegan's Field Read Online Free PDF

supermarket (loo paper, laundry liquid, three-litre bottle of milk, Bodie Hogan ). Brian would be taking Maddie and D-fer for a walk. She’d be done soon; she’d go home and put on dinner. Afterwards, she’d try to think up a new strategy.
    *   *   *
    Mrs Flynn was watering her front yard when Anne pulled into the drive. She didn’t go up to the garage door, didn’t hit the remote, but killed the engine, got out of the car, and walked across the road. The old lady’s white hair caught the afternoon light and seemed to glow, and her smile was friendly and sad as Anne approached.
    There was no good way, thought Anne, no easy way. She blurted, “I’m sorry, but … I know you lost a child…”
    She may as well as have slapped the woman’s sweet face. No, punched it, pressed it in as far as she could for the features appeared to collapse in on themselves. Anne put out a hand to stop her from turning away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be cruel, but I have to talk to someone.”
    Mrs Flynn nodded slowly, waited; made Anne speak.
    â€œWere there any suspects?” She didn’t know if that was the thing to ask, but it was all her mind released from its depths.
    The old woman shook her head but said, “Plenty, love. Plenty, but none as they could prove and none as they could pin it on.”
    â€œAnyone who’s still here?”
    â€œMick Galbraith, Neil Rooney. Aidan Hanrahan’s older brother Liam, him as hung himself from a tree out by Deadman’s Mount a year after my Bridie went missing. An unlikely suspect for you, to be sure.”
    Galbraith and Rooney were old, old men now, both in the Care Home on the South Side. Neither was sufficiently mobile to grab a small child and spirit her away; they certainly hadn’t been any more limber three years earlier. Anne rubbed her hands hard over her face, concentrating on the pressure, trying to anchor herself to something solid-seeming.
    â€œWorst day of my life, Annie. Realising she’d not come home from school, then waiting and waiting and saying all the prayers I was ever going to have in me. Making promises to a shite of a God while the men searched high and low, through paddocks and bush, dredged the rivers and dams, turned people’s homes inside out, looking for my little girl. And all those prayers, Annie, all that begging and what did it get me? Nowt. Not even a body to bury.” She puffed, trying to get her breath back; then Anne realised she was wheezing a laugh up from her ancient lungs. Mrs Flynn said something then, so low Anne doubted she heard properly: “Perhaps there’s something worse, though, having one come home.”
    The old woman turned away, twisting the hose nozzle to shut the water off, and reeling in the sinuous length of its body as she shuffled up her drive before Anne could say anymore.
    Returning across the road, Anne saw the front door of her own house opening and Madrigal flew out, for all intents and purposes a little girl happy to see her mother home with the shopping, hopeful of a treat or two. It was only as they drew closer that Maddie’s expression changed, twisted, became hateful, her nose twitching, nostrils widening to take in some odour Anne wasn’t sensitive enough to detect.
    Maddie steamtrained towards her and latched onto the nearest wrist, her nails digging into the skin, and her teeth—those lovely small teeth!—tore into the flesh. Anne registered the white-hot pain of something that grew and dug deeper than it should, Brian’s shout from the doorway, D-fer’s whimpering, then passed out from an agony that seemed all out of proportion.
    *   *   *
    â€œIt wasn’t her fault,” she said desperately to Dr Marten, sitting on the edge of the trolleybed. “Not her fault at all.”
    â€œAnne, she could have killed you.”
    You don’t know the half