Those We Left Behind Read Free

last week from the probation officer who’s been assigned to him. She wants a word with you. I told her to come by today, late morning. All right?’
    She remembered Ciaran Devine, a child then, a young man now. A little over seven years ago, the first awkward signs of puberty about him, sitting across the table from her in an interview room. She was the only one he talked to. He called her by her first name. Even when he confessed, she struggled to picture this small boy doing that terrible thing.
    She had voiced her doubts, but the boy had confessed, and that was enough.
    Ciaran had sent her a letter after his and his brother’s convictions. It came via the station. She had blushed when she read it. It still lay at the back of a drawer in her bedroom at home, even though she should have destroyed it.
    ‘All right,’ Flanagan said.
    ‘Good. Here’s hoping he stays out of trouble.’
    As Purdy left the room, closing the door behind him, Flanagan pictured Ciaran Devine’s thin fingers, the tiny cuts on his skin. She pushed the image from her mind and opened the folder in front of her.
    Flanagan met Paula Cunningham in the reception area at twenty-five minutes past eleven. A little less than average height, slim build but not skinny, perhaps a decade younger than Flanagan. Businesslike in her manner.
    Stop it, Flanagan told herself. Every new person she met was subject to the same kind of snap judgements, as if they were a suspect in some investigation only she knew about.
    She gave Cunningham’s ID a cursory glance, nodded, extended her hand. They shook.
    ‘Thank you for seeing me,’ Cunningham said. ‘I know you’ve just returned to work. I’m sure you’ve a lot to catch up on.’
    ‘Surprisingly little,’ Flanagan said. ‘My office okay?’
    ‘Absolutely.’
    They did not speak as Flanagan led Cunningham beyond the locked doors and up to her room. Cunningham took a seat. Flanagan sat opposite.
    Cunningham looked up at the window over Flanagan’s shoulder. ‘Doesn’t it get claustrophobic in here? So little light.’
    ‘You get used to it,’ Flanagan said. ‘So you wanted a chat.’
    ‘Yes,’ Cunningham said, pulling a notebook and pen from her bag. ‘About Ciaran Devine.’
    Moleskine notebook. Parker pen. Good quality, but not flashy. Functional. Plain shoes with a small heel. Not much jewellery, minimal make-up.
    Stop it, Flanagan told herself again.
    ‘What do you want to know?’ Flanagan asked.
    Cunningham opened the notebook, readied her pen. ‘I understand you conducted most of the interviews with Ciaran.’
    ‘That’s right. You should be able to access the transcripts that were submitted by the prosecution.’
    ‘Yes, I have them. But I wanted your impressions of him. What did you feel about him?’
    Flanagan looked away, hoped her discomfort didn’t show. She examined the back of her left hand. Her wedding and engagement rings. The small scar from when, as a child, she’d tried to crawl beneath barbed wire into the field behind her grandfather’s house to see the pony with the sagging belly and matted coat.
    ‘Well, my first impression,’ Flanagan said. ‘My first impression was the blood on the wall.’

 
     
     
SATURDAY 24TH MARCH 2007
    Purdy, a DCI then, led her through the house. A detective sergeant for almost five years, Flanagan had seen many murder scenes. The ugliness of the act, the indignity of it. And the intrusion of strangers into the victim’s home, his or her life laid bare in all its banality and oddness. Evidence of personal habits that would shame the victim if he were alive to know they had been discovered. Slovenliness, loneliness, addiction. Sudden and violent death rarely visited those with stable lives, with loving families, with purpose to their days. More often than not, murder happened on drunken nights between friends brought together by their mutual dependencies, petty arguments exploding into bloodshed, kitchen knives buried in throats, heads