“Go on, then,” she said.
“When was the last time you saw him?” Lennon asked.
“I couldn’t tell you exactly, but it was more than two years ago.”
“What was the weather like?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Was it warm and sunny? Cold and wet?”
She shrugged. “There was a wee nip in the air.”
“Was it dark or light outside?”
“Just getting dark,” she said. “I was still working at the time, and I’d just got home when he was setting off.”
“You’d just got home. So around six o’clock, then?”
“No, more like seven that night, I think.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I was a home help,” she said. “You know, getting tea for them that can’t do it for themselves, lighting their fires, putting out their rubbish, that kind of thing.”
“And it was getting dark, so maybe October time?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Did he have any friends?”
“No, not Edwin,” she said. “Not really. He knew people, like, but no one he really socialized with. He kept himself to himself. Quiet, but chatty when he wanted to be. He could be awful nice at times, then other times he could be crooked as anything.
“He got that from his mother. My sister. She always had a wee bit of a lacking in her. I knew she’d wind up in the state she did.”
“What state was that?” Lennon asked.
“In a mental home, screaming at the walls. I sometimes think Edwin couldn’t help turning out the way he did, being raised by the likes of that.”
“Was he born here?” Lennon asked.
“No, over the water. Cora was a wild wee girl. Always chasing after the boys. Always thinking they’d like her better if she let them have their way with her. No sense in her at all. She got worse when the soldiers came. Throwing herself at them, she was. And she was a pretty enough wee thing, so she had plenty of soldiers wanted to take her out. Course, she didn’t have the wit to keep her legs closed, so they got what they wanted and that was that until she chased after another one. She had our poor Ma’s heart broke. There was more than one time she had to get herself sorted, and not by a doctor, if you know what I mean.”
The corners of her mouth turned down in distaste at the idea.
“Then there was this one soldier, he was near for coming out of the army when he took up with her. He mustn’t have been wise himself, ’cause next thing you know, they’re going together. Like boyfriend and girlfriend, I mean. So when he finishes his tour, they get married.”
Sissy’s eyes grew distant as she spoke, memories playing out behind them, the flickering light of the television reflected in their sheen.
“I remember it well. A registry office do, not even a church. She was starting to show then. Our Ma took us both into town to get new dresses for it, and she near died when she saw the belly on Cora in the fitting rooms. She slapped the head off her right there in the shop. Jesus, I can still hear the screams of her.
“It was a disgrace in them days to get pregnant out of wedlock, not like today. These days the wee girls pop out babies left, right and center, doesn’t matter if there’s a daddy for them or not.
“Anyway, thank God yous’re getting married, my Ma says, and that was that. There was no reception to speak of, just five of us in the pub with a plate of sandwiches. Cora and her fella, some mate of his, me and our Ma. Cora and the two boys got pissed as farts. Girls didn’t worry about drinking when they were pregnant in them days. Me and our Ma drank a half a Guinness each and left them to it.”
She paused, eyed Lennon. “You have any youngsters?”
“A little girl,” Lennon said.
Sissy clucked and shook her head. “Wee girls are the worst. They’ll break your heart.”
Lennon did not answer, so she sighed and continued.
“So off they went to England. Salford, to be exact, that’s part of Manchester.”
“I know,” Lennon said.
“Well, I didn’t. Not until I went over to see them one Easter. Awful auld hole they lived in. Top floor of a house, one bedroom, a sink in the corner of the living room, and a toilet they had to share with some darkies that lived downstairs. Three days I was there, and I never saw the husband once. He was out drinking all the time, chasing other women, any sort of badness he could get himself in to.
“And Cora was going downhill by then. She did her best to let on nothing was wrong, but you could tell she was coming apart. You know when someone drops in on you unexpected, and you tidy the place in a panic? You know, shoving magazines behind the couch, throwing dirty dishes in the sink, that kind of thing? That’s what she was like. Not the house, I mean, but in herself. Like she’d scraped up all the madness and tidied it away. But you could see it there, behind her eyes.
“And wee Edwin. He was maybe five or six at the time. Hardly the clothes to stand up in. I brought him an Easter egg and you’d have thought it was the last bit of chocolate on earth the way he took into it. But I didn’t see much of him that weekend either. Cora used to lock him in the bedroom with a Bible. Hours and hours in there.
“Aye, she got religion while she was away. Of a sort, anyway. All weekend, she kept trying to convert me. I told her, I says, I go to the Church of Ireland every Sunday morning with our Ma, and that’s enough God and Jesus to see me through to the next Sunday. I didn’t need no preaching off the likes of her. But still she kept at it, nonstop.
“In the end up I lost my patience with her and said a few things that needed saying. She didn’t take too kindly to that, so she put me out. I remember waiting for a taxi out in the rain, wee Edwin watching me from the bedroom window, that round face of his up against the glass. I waved at him the once but he didn’t wave back. Just kept staring.
“We didn’t hear a peep from her for another year till our Ma got a letter saying the husband had died. Fell piss drunk into the canal and drowned. Our Ma wrote back, said Cora could come home to us if she wanted, but we never heard anything more. Not until she finally lost the head altogether and got put away.
“Edwin was twelve or thirteen by then. When they found him, he’d been locked in the bedroom for more than a week, nothing but the Bible to keep him from going mad himself. He was lucky there was a washbasin in the bedroom, or he’d have died in there.
“We wanted him to come to Belfast to stay with me and our Ma—he was her only grandchild, and she’d never set eyes on him—but the granny on the father’s side objected. She said she didn’t want him coming to this place, with all the killings going on. Can’t say I blamed her. You look old enough to remember what this place was like in the eighties.” “I remember,” Lennon said.
“Aye, well, not many of us had it easy. As far as I know, when he turned eighteen, he took Cora into his care. I didn’t hear anything more from them until she died. I never went to the funeral. It was over there somewhere.
“But not long after that, I got a phone call from him asking if he could come and stay with me. I was a bit wary, I’ll be honest with you, seeing as I didn’t really know him from Adam. But our Ma had passed on a year before, and I was finding it lonely here by myself, so I thought, what harm could it do?”
She wagged a finger at Lennon.
“I’ll tell you something, though. If I’d known about the other, the prison and the sex offender business, I wouldn’t have let him come near me. But by the time I found out about all that, sure it was too late.”
When Sissy finished speaking she appeared deflated, as if the words had taken all the air out of her. Lennon considered ending the questioning, but knew she was the only connection to the man he sought.
“What about women?” he asked. “Did he have any girlfriends here? Anyone he brought back? Anyone he visited?”
“God, no,” she said. “Not unless you count wee Mrs. Crawford.”
“Mrs. Crawford?”
