Incredulously, Jenny said, ‘You wrote them out?’

  ‘Jennifer, you know I’m a person of lists. If I could, I would have my entire life columned on a single sheet of A4.’

  ‘Will we sit?’

  ‘No. We’re fine, aren’t we? Now, when I sent you the solicitor’s letter, I hoped you would take it in the manner intended. Like, I didn’t want to blindside you. I mean, I am not trying to upset you or cause you difficulties. I trust you understand that?’

  Jenny swallowed. When her mother or sister had to say that they were not doing something, it usually meant that they were.

  Vera said, ‘You never acknowledged that letter my solicitor sent you.’ Then she craned her head, as if peering into her daughter’s life.

  Jenny didn’t like being alone with her in this room. ‘The room’ was where Stalin killed you. ‘I did. When we were last out for lunch, you asked if I’d got the letter and I said yes.’

  ‘But you never asked me about it.’

  ‘Why would I? There was nothing mysterious or confusing about the instruction it contained. Unless, it didn’t mean, “Get out of the house in twelve months”?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘It didn’t mean that?’

  ‘Of course it did, but—’

  ‘But what? You’re throwing me out of a house that Dad promised me. It’s mine. It’s mine in every way except the one way that counts in this world – on paper. But you know it should be mine.’ Jenny felt surprisingly formidable, finally getting to speak to her mother like that. It had come naturally, when usually every moment in Vera’s presence was like a tricky chess game. ‘Dad bought Clareville years ago as an investment and he told me it would be mine when I got back from Canada. You know this. And you are taking it away from me.’

  Vera raised her eyes dismissively and gestured to the window. ‘This street is full of families. Neighbours are how you designate a child’s future. They go to the same schools. They become their friends. If your neighbours are fine, your children will be fine. Clareville is wasted on you. You’ll be happier in an apartment or wherever childless middle-aged couples go to live. I wouldn’t know.’

  Jenny was stunned at her mother’s gall. It was as if Vera expected praise for making her realise that this was all for her own good; that she was actually doing Jenny a favour.

  ‘Now, you’ve had a good run in the house. How many years have I rented it to you?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Yes, eight. Expensive to run but built to last. They have grace, those old Victorians. Today, they’d make houses out of Styrofoam if they could get away with it. But I presumed you would have questions. Questions to keep yourself informed.’ Vera spoke with casual conviction; a woman who didn’t expect to be doubted. ‘And I am the person who can inform.’

  Jenny inhaled, seeking courage, and then spoke softly: ‘Mum… you’ll only tell me whatever version of the truth suits yourself and suits Joan. In that order.’

  Vera’s lips straightened. They were lined from decades of smoking a pack a day, which at seventy-five had had zero effect on her health. Likewise, the bottle of vodka that still needed replacing every three days. ‘No. You have my word…’

  Jenny smiled at that. The word of a trained liar. If you couldn’t tell the truth by your seventh decade, you were never going to. On a purely superficial level, Vera probably believed what she was saying; the best liars believe their own deceits. Jenny had always regretted reaching the age when she discovered that people could lie to themselves as well as to others.

  ‘It doesn’t actually matter, Mum. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here because of what Joan said to me, in front of Shane, in Clareville today. What the hell was she—’

  ‘It’s all connected.’

  Jenny placed her teacup onto the side table. Something was certainly amiss. She could feel it. It filled the room around them, crackling and sizzling and calling out to be noticed.

  ‘What is connected?’

  ‘The Clareville house and what Joan was talking to you about… that business twenty-five years ago. That’s what is connected.’

  Jenny looked as if a memory had suddenly returned that was so vivid, it was a haunting. We remember what we can’t forget.

  ‘I just think, Jennifer, that there are wheels and cogs churning all around you… that you’re not aware of… that just might be secretly working for you… and you’ll see the results of it sooner than you think.’

  ‘Mum, I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ve something to tell you,’ Vera said with a hint of glee.

  She’s going to tell me something that she knows will upset me.

  ‘Twenty-five years ago. It’s the anniversary and recently I was thinking…’ Vera’s eyes narrowed, and Jenny stared into them. They both soaked up the silence. There was an echo in their lives of a sworn vow to never broach the subject. ‘But first, have you told him?’

  ‘Shane?’

  ‘Yes. Shane.’ His name was long and drawn out on her mother’s tongue – a special treat she’d allowed herself. ‘And don’t even think about telling me it’s none of my business. It is. I’m your mother. And I was there. Do you understand the point I’m making, Jennifer?’

  ‘Yes. And fine – I told him.’

  Vera nodded slowly. But it actually meant that she didn’t believe her. Jenny had learned the subtle signs from a young age. ‘Where’s your dad?’ meant Mum was in a good mood. ‘Where’s your father?’ meant she was in foul form. Jenny knew that when her mother stared while nodding thoughtfully, it was a forerunner to shutting down the entire conversation, and taking the course of action she’d intended to take, regardless of any petitions to the contrary.

  Jenny said, ‘OK. Of course I haven’t told him.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Vera snapped – and by her taking the Lord’s name in vain, Jenny knew that she meant business. ‘It’s twenty-five years since it happened. If you’re not going to tell your husband now… then I’d ask myself why?’

  ‘I know why.’ For Jenny, talking to her mother was like talking to the police, or worse. It was like being on the stand, fighting for your freedom, when you know you’re guilty of something but only the prosecution knows what for; and so, there is no alternative but to wait to see the direction the questioning will take. ‘Look, Mum, what do you want from me? Why can’t you all just leave me alone?’

  ‘Things like that don’t simply go away. You can’t outrun your past, Jennifer.’

  ‘Why are you doing this? And what has it got to do with taking Clareville off me? But fine, if you still want to punish me for what happened when I was just eighteen years old, then give it to Joan or one of her girls.’

  Vera looked genuinely puzzled. ‘I’m not giving the house to Joan or any of my grandchildren.’

  ‘Huh? Then who? You don’t need the money and obviously it’s not for Hugh and—’

  ‘Of course it’s not for Hugh. Don’t be such a… a bitch.’

  ‘You know I didn’t mean … Sorry. But just tell me, Mum. What’s going on?’

  There’s a split second before Vera chooses her response. Blink and you’d miss it. But Jenny didn’t and she doesn’t. Whatever Vera was planning to do with the house, it made Vera uneasy – and Vera was never uneasy.

  Just as her mother was about to speak, the living room door opened, and Jenny’s stomach took an alpine plunge.

  27

  5.54 pm: Having put the failed security cameras out of his mind, Otto’s lean angular face stared at the TV, changing station each time his thoughts switched theme. The flickering screen created the illusion of activity, allowing him to sit still in his edgy state. He was thinking too fast, as if he had two brains, passing ideas from one to the other and back again.

  So what if Shane is an accomplished writer? Most arty types weren’t smart enough to make money. The few that were – the kind that ended up hiring him – didn’t really make art; they created wealth under the guise of art. Such as his favourite painting that hung above his bed that portrayed a map of the world in matte colours that had cost Otto fifty thousand euros at auction. He craned his neck and looked up to the painting. I have what I want.

  Even as the words drifted across his brain, he knew they weren’t true. If he had what he wanted, he’d have a Rothko over the bed. But he wasn’t at that level – yet. I’m full of shit. He actually hated Rothko. I don’t know what I want. I have millions and I’m going to make millions more and I haven’t got around to spending the millions I made years ago. He’d always felt that he could paint a Rothko in five minutes; though he knew that to even think such a sentence was utterly forbidden. Jenny could’ve sorted my life out. I could’ve loved her.

  His thoughts always swung back to Jenny. From the day she had re-entered his life, the calendar pages had flown off the wall. The world spun on, and she’d remained entrenched in the front of his brain. Now, they were done. All it had taken was for the stakes to be raised –and he’d raised them by trying to kiss her.

  After he’d abruptly left the university and moved to London, Otto assumed he’d never see her again. Then, after eight years, she’d texted him. He was making waves in the Dublin business scene, and she was a burgeoning interior designer who was wondering if any of Otto’s clients might like to see her portfolio. Considering his unspoken debt to her, they met up and he was delighted to see that she hadn’t changed much since he’d been her lecturer. Back then she’d been fresh-faced, golden tanned; in another age she could have been the poster child of the Hitler Youth. Eight years on she had been much the same: still blonde, but now buttery blonde. The passing years had given her face angles that she’d been missing, and which her intelligence deserved. Time had framed her jaw and lengthened her neck.

  It had not been difficult to set her up as a consultant. She had the right attitude from the start – bringing all the formality of her parents’ life of wealth and influence to her own, post-wealth, life. Her late father’s name was still respected, and Otto bore witness to Jenny rolling that old business establishment grenade of the Donaldson name into many boardrooms.

  Fixing his pillow and checking the time – 5.56 pm – Otto considered going out to empty his head at the cinema. The dark auditorium was the equivalent to a garage or shed: a place to relax alone without the problematic condition of finding himself alone with himself. Then, afterwards, he would pick up some greasy chips and take the long way home, his favourite drive, that detoured through the heart of Clareville. Otto would look into those fine Victorian homes, because most of them left their blinds open to let the expensive lamps and ceiling lights illuminate the type of life that he hadn’t experienced since living with his parents.

  As his car crawled down Jenny’s street, he’d tune in the classic rock station that played hits he hadn’t heard in decades; songs that, when he’d first heard them, he assumed would be with him forever. While eating chips, he’d watch Jenny in her natural habitat so that he could convince himself that it was her unnatural habitat. He wanted her to be the person she used to be when he taught her. Then he could be the man he had once been – the one that he liked.

  It was a week since he’d last taken that drive. Parking opposite Jenny’s, the car stinking of salt and vinegar, he turned off the headlights, so the SUV’s interior was no longer illuminated. He then stared over at the half-pulled blinds that revealed Shane sunk in his beanbag, slowly killing the evening with a hardback.

  For Otto, that bright window was like a movie screen playing an alternative reality, one where he’d stayed in Dublin twenty-five years ago, finished his PhD, married Jenny and she’d stayed with him forever.

  So, this is what I could’ve been.

  With ‘Careless Whisper’ oozing from the car speakers, he experienced a thrilling intimacy knowing that Jenny was somewhere in there, only twenty feet away, having no idea who was outside her door.

  He’d finally made his move today. The kiss. What had he expected? He had expected her to kiss him back, and within his kiss she would’ve received the message that she’d been institutionalised by marriage; that she’d been labouring under a form of Stockholm syndrome; that he was here to save her; that adultery was not the worst crime in the world. Not by a long shot.

  But he had misjudged, and it was his job never to misjudge. That’s love – it corrupts. Distorts. Warps. Desire and ruination were essentially bound together. They were absolute and unchangeable, a consequence and its cause.

  It was obvious now, that once this investment was put to rest, he and Jenny would drift apart forever. He’d overstepped a critical line. What could he offer her in the future, anyway? He was getting old while a girl like Jenny belonged to the nationality of the young, regardless of her actual age.

  It was a sign of waning, the need to spend time with younger people. Maybe he’d just wanted to tell her how he felt; that he suddenly found himself lacking in hope; the blood and meat of the young. I am now Jenny’s antidote to desire. She’d rather throw back a jar of strychnine and spend hours writhing on the floor in spasms of agony while her internal organs give up one by one than sleep with you, Otto.

  Otto liked to ponder her circumstances; as if something was at stake for him, too, in how her life unravelled. Jenny was obsessed with owning that house she lived in; as if her name on the title would make her someone, the way her neighbours were all somebodies. He’d tried to ease that obsession by suggesting she downsize or at least try another neighbourhood where all her spoils from the investment wouldn’t be swallowed up in one go. People think that if you owned a beautiful house in a great area, then you were rich. But the fact was, that for most of those people, they were only rich if they sold that house. He told her, ‘You’re white, educated, pretty and speak English. That means, if your dream dies, you get another.’ But it had been to no avail.

  From downstairs came a knock on the front door – loud and solid.

  Why didn’t they ring the bell? Hold on – how did they get through the electric gates without buzzing me?

  Another loud knock.

  How afraid should he be?

  Otto’s unease momentarily raised his glasses a few centimetres off his nose and his eyes stared with pupils like manholes. Another thump sounded, and he suddenly realised that what he was hearing were not knocks, but kicks.

  The door was being booted in.

  He stood, and like a cat trying to calm itself with the sound of its own purrs, muttered, ‘Don’t worry – everything’s going to be alright.’

  He didn’t believe for a minute that everything was going to be alright.

  The front door swung open, the frame hitting the side table next to it. Heavy footsteps pounded on the wooden floor. Boots. How many were there? His heart smashed against his ribcage. The footsteps moved up the staircase and onto the landing, then past the first bedroom and the second, towards the master bedroom, towards Otto; louder, more forceful, marching along until directly outside his door. For a second Otto thought about diving beneath the bed. He wondered if he’d ever had a more cowardly thought.

  Then he remembered his gun.

  He owned a pistol. A small Glock. When working in an advisory capacity for a pharmaceutical multinational, they’d assigned him a bodyguard, someone highly trained in lethal mayhem, due to the death threats the executives had been getting after their briefly trialled product was firmly associated with causing neurological damage in the many children who had used it. Otto had bought the Glock from his bodyguard who had told him, ‘This is for when you come across someone like me, when I’m not around. You’ll be fine if the target is twenty-five feet from you or closer. If they’re further away, then let them come to you and kill them or, if they’re running, let them run and call the police.’

  There was no time to call the police.

  Otto wanted to run across the bedroom, but his legs only walked, his sagging untucked shirt hanging from him in awkward pain. It was like his body was on strike, refusing to function at anywhere near its potential. He made it across the room and jammed his fist into the drawer. There it was. The cold metal. The rough handle grip.

  Behind him, the bedroom door swung open.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Otto said. He’d wanted it to be thunderous and defiant. Instead, it was quiet, inexact, like something from a badly tuned radio. Otto felt drenched in freezing water. His skin goose-bumped, his spine straightened almost painfully, and his fists balled but seemed to weigh too much. His entire being had never felt so unprepared, so unworthy of a challenge.

  A muscular, bearded man strode into the room, a cut-throat razor held above his head, ready to slash down. His head was shaved, and he wore a thin leather jacket. Otto raised the pistol from the drawer, but the man was already on him. He gripped Otto by the neck with such force that his knees buckled from having oxygen and blood supply instantly denied. The pistol fell back into the drawer.

  For the first time in his life, Otto made his ‘Even Money Can’t Save Me Now’ face. With the blade to Otto’s throat, the man’s enormous hand clutched the back of his neck and wrenched him across the room. Otto’s knees hit the floor, but he forced the pain to remain inside.

  The man said, ‘To kill an animal – any animal – you have to take it by surprise.’

  Otto hooked a foot between the vertical ribs of a radiator, but the man simply bent over him like he might bend over a thing, and with a fist clenched in his hair, half-pulled, half-slid Otto across the varnished floor.

  The man said, ‘You have to seize it and then penetrate it. With a knife. Or a spear.’

  It was daunting to be reduced to a piece of cargo. The pain from Otto’s scalp poured into his sensory realm, hurting his head from the inside out.

  ‘Doing it with a bullet just turns death into play with a remote-controlled toy. Where’s the fun?’ He had a bored, patient expression. His shaved head and beard made his deeper emotions impenetrable.

  Keeling over, Otto saw his own face in the smooth polished floor. It was like diving into his reflection. At fifty-three, he’d already lived long enough to be present at the burial of his own reputation.