The Final Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

said.
    ‘Still, she’s your family. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s the way it is. It’s only once a week. You can stand her once a week, can’t you?’
    Ellen turned her gaze out of the window.
    ‘Can’t you?’ Lennon repeated.
    ‘I suppose,’ she said.
    ‘Good girl,’ Lennon said. ‘It’s part of growing up. There’s things you don’t want to do, but you go ahead and do them anyway, because it’s the right thing. You understand?’
    ‘I suppose.’
    Ellen remained quiet for a time before she asked, ‘Why does Aunt Bernie hate you so much?’
    Lennon applied the handbrake at a set of lights. ‘She thinks I’m a bad person,’ he said.
    ‘Why does she think that?’ Ellen asked.
    ‘She doesn’t like policemen, for one thing. And she blames me for what happened to your mother.’
    Ellen shook her head. ‘That’s stupid. You tried to help her.’
    Lennon could have argued with his daughter, told her he sometimes blamed himself for Marie McKenna’s death, as illogical as he knew that idea to be. He could have told Ellen that her mother’s fate was only one of the burdens he carried with him every day.
    Instead, he said, ‘I love you, you know that, right?’
    He heard the click of Ellen’s seatbelt coming undone. She leaned over from the back seat, wrapped her arm around him. He kissed her hand. Felt her lips on his cheek. Felt clean for the first time that day.
    ‘Seatbelt,’ he said as the lights changed.

6
     
    REA STARED INTO the gloom for long seconds, feeling like a rodent gazing into the mouth of a silent owl.
    After a while, she shook herself, swallowed blood, and said, ‘All right.’
    She got to her feet and steadied herself against the banister as a giddy wave washed through her. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, and she saw that a thin trickle of light seeped in around the edges of a closed blind. She released her grip on the banister and stepped towards the threshold. The painted doorsill creaked beneath her foot.
    Inside, she could make out variations in the dark, blocks that might be furniture, patterns that could be pictures on the walls. She felt for a light switch, found it, and flicked it on. The glare of the single bare bulb made her squint, and she raised her hand as a shield.
    The word ‘office’ appeared in her mind.
    Of course, it was a home office. Just like many people had in a spare bedroom. A desk that looked as if it had been rescued from a school sat at the centre of the room, along with a single chair. A cork noticeboard on one wall, bare but for the drawing pins that dotted it. A large map of the British Isles on another.
    Yet it didn’t make sense.
    From what Ida had told her, Rea’s uncle had been a manual labourer. He had been in the merchant navy at one time, before he’d got married, but he had worked with his hands ever since. Travelled all over Britain and Ireland, wherever he could find employment. Why would he need an office in his home? And who would have an office without a computer of some kind – a laptop, or even one of those little netbooks?
    ‘You didn’t know him,’ she said aloud.
    Rea scolded herself for talking to the empty room. She’d been doing it more and more frequently. A symptom of being single for so long. Next thing, she’d have a dozen cats.
    With a creeping feeling of being an intruder, she crossed to the desk and stood by the chair. The surface of the desk was scarred with childish graffiti, slurs and insults, names of bands who’d come and gone by the eighties. The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Specials. In another patch, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Dio. The kind of music middle-class schoolboys listened to while they squeezed their spots. Rea imagined this piece of furniture in some grammar school, the air thick with chalk dust, an ageing master conjugating Latin verbs while a pale young man scratched the words Echo and the Bunnymen into the wood. Raymond had probably rescued it from a