AllFreeNovel
Share Us
FORTY-TWO
The news was on again. The murder at Brownstone. The eight-year-old who’d been killed on her way to her grandmother’s birthday party.
Although Scotland Yard has not yet confirmed whether it believes this crime to be connected to the string of murders in North London, there are certain key similarities between the cases which it says are, ‘striking’.
‘All those women,’ my mother said, pouring a large glass of wine. A new habit. The orange juice gone by the wayside.
‘They aren’t all women. Niamh Keenan was eight.’
She covered her eyes, ground the balls of her hands into the sockets.
‘My God, Jesus.’
‘It’s not Matty,’ I told her. ‘You can stop thinking that.’
‘I know,’ she said, but I could tell she didn’t.
Ireland’s a big place, but Brownstone isn’t. A population of just a few hundred people. A village where people used to leave their doors unlocked and wouldn’t hesitate to help out a stranger– until Niamh was attacked.
All these years later, I’m haunted by the birthday party that never happened. The image of Niamh’s mother scanning the street; increasingly anxious about where her daughter had got to.
Of her grandmother never blowing out her candles. Of Niamh’s present to her (a clay pot she’d made at school) remaining forever in its wrapping.
And Matty in the centre of it all, a spectator to events unfolding. Joining the search for the child. Comforting her parents.
‘I met her the other day,’ he apparently told them. ‘I’d got lost. She told me how to get back to the village. Such a sweet girl. You’re in my thoughts.’
Brownstone. Population of 771. A murder committed just weeks after Matty arrived, with ‘striking’ similarities to the Shadow killings. Killings carried out in North London, ‘by a man living in Camden’ according to the police, just like Matty. Witness accounts that could have been describing him.
None of that was lost on me. But I knew Matty, knew he’d never hurt a child. I latched onto the smallest things, convincing myself there was nothing to worry about, without actually realising that’s what I was trying to do.
He was staying with his parents, wouldn’t they notice if he came home with blood on him? He’d recently sprained his index finger playing squash. You can’t strangle someone with a finger sprain. Can you?
I’m not sure I actually articulated these thoughts. They were more like spectres dancing at the back of my mind. I didn’t voice them, because I didn’t need to. That a murder had taken place in his village so soon after he arrived was a coincidence, that’s all.
Besides, as I tried to explain to my mother, the profile proved Matty couldn’t be involved.
A psychological portrait of the killer had recently been released to the press, put together by some big shot from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit who’d flown over to the UK to advise Scotland Yard.
Behavioral Science– or B.S. as the wretched Bea called it– was a new discipline. Certain people, including her father she said, reckoned it was a load of ‘hocus pocus’. But I loved the idea you could deduce details about a perpetrator from the commissioning of their crime.
A Sherlock Holmes fan, I daydreamed about becoming a famous criminologist when I grew up, cracking cases no one else could. Or maybe I’d write a mystery thriller, make my detective a profiler.
‘Bright girl like you; work hard and you can be anything you want,’ my teacher said when I mentioned my ambitions.
I suppose I have become a murder specialist of sorts, but not in the way I intended. My academic career didn’t go the way I’d intended either, though by the time it went to pot I no longer cared.
‘Listen to this,’ I’d told my mother, reading from the profile printed on the front page of the paper lying on the coffee table:
‘Given the level of overkill, the offender has a violent temper. He is not likely in a relationship, but if he is, it will be an abusive one in which he exerts physical and/or coercive control over his partner such as repeatedly belittling her or monitoring her time and what she wears.
‘He has a history of cruelty to animals and possibly arson. Given the nature of the attacks, he also has trouble relating to women and may appear uncomfortable around them. Likely he is socially awkward, a bit of a loner. . .
‘See,’ I concluded triumphantly. ‘Nothing like Matty. Since when was he ever awkward around anyone?’
‘True,’ she answered, but her heart wasn’t in it.
She topped up her wine glass, sipped it sleepily.
