“How are you?”
He shrugs, not even turning around. She knows he’s taken his death bad; they all have. But whereas the women in the house collect together to cry, he’s happy to seclude himself. As if them seeing him cry will make him less of a man.
“It’s going to be okay, you know? We’re all going to be grand…”
She stops. She hardly believes it herself, never mind trying to convince him. But she has to do something. He barely talks about his feelings; she’s worried they’ll swallow him up. The majority of suicides in this city especially are carried out by males. She’d even lost someone she used to run around with at youth club when they were younger. She hadn’t spoken to him in years, but still thinks would he have done it if she had reached out to him? She won’t let it happen with her brother, despite how bad their current situation and feelings towards each other might be. Standing, she opens the slide robes and starts unpacking all the shopping bags filled with things from Ritchie’s room in the old house. They hadn’t gotten around to unpacking them, and this is the first time he’d been home since they moved in. She throws a few bags on the bed, unsettling him. Curiosity kicking in, he turns towards her.
“What are you doing?”
“Decorating,” she smirks, chucking him his old school Gaelic shirt she hopes is washed, “c’mon. Let’s go through what you want and what you don’t want. We can take some stuff to the tip, or give it to the charity shop. It’ll be fun.”
“I think you and I have different opinions on what ‘fun’ is,” Ritchie mutters, but still sits up and pulls a bag towards him despite the comment.
Half an hour later, the room is a bombsite. Posters of Bob Marley and Scarface are uncurling on the bed under school textbooks he definitely hadn’t returned. His clothes lie in piles. A pile to throw out and a pile for the charity shops. He’s gained almost two stone since he’s shipped off to Wales, there’s no way he could fit into any of them. Pictures litter the floor, surrounding the two who sit cross-legged facing one another, laughing and brandishing their new finds in one another’s face.
“Fuck,” Ritchie yelps, tossing a picture over to his sister, who has to scurry under the bed to retrieve it, “remember this night?”
When Danielle finally finds it, she bursts into laughter once more, her cheeks blushing. The photo shows her guzzling an electric blue WKD, an arm slung around her brother, who is looking at her with mild amusement.
“That was the worst night of my life.”
“First night I’ve seen you drunk.”
They laugh some more.
“You made me promise not to tell Da,” Ritchie giggles, “because you boked in the bath when you got home.”
“The toilet was too far away,” Danielle huffs, “he found out anyway.”
“Aye, ‘cause I told him,” Ritchie sniggers, “that was the first night you snogged Chris. I wanted to teach you a lesson.”
“Fuck he was ragin’,” Danielle elongates the ‘a,’ “I mean, it was only a few WKDs, imagine if he saw the sight of me after a few gins now.”
The laughter dies out and they look away from each other. Embarrassed at how they both acted. When Ritchie looks back up, he sees his sister wiping away tears. Skirting over, ignoring the collection of memories, he pulls his sister into an embrace. After a few moments, she says she’s grand, and he slides back to where he was. They continue to stare at each other. So many unspoken words, just lingering in the air between them.
“Are you going to see him again?”
“Chris?”
Ritchie nods.
“I don’t know…”
She honestly doesn’t, Danielle thinks. The feelings are obviously still there, on both sides, by what she could figure last night. She almost went to unblock him on her Facebook, in case he needed to make contact, but it was just too hard. She wouldn’t have been able to stop herself from looking back over his life without her.
“I don’t think right now is a good time to be making any rash decisions,” Ritchie squeezes her hand.
She smiles and nods, before they break apart and start collecting the pictures back into the old shoebox.
“Ritchie! Danielle! Michelle!”
It’s Dermott, calling from downstairs.
“Yeah?” Michelle has opened her bedroom door, closest to Ritchie’s at the back of the house.
“Come downstairs, I think you’re going to want to hear this.”
Chapter Fifty-One:
Victor Sargent remains silent as McNally and Ferguson file back into the room and take their seats. When the recording commences, he continues to look at the floor, his hands entwined on his lap. McNally and Ferguson wait for him to break down. If word got out that he brought Billy Taylor’s name into a police investigation, the man will be a dead man walking. The best thing he can do now is comply.
“My client would like to make a statement,” Beattie looks up at them from his glasses as he lifts the piece of paper in front of them. “On the night of the 18th June 2016, my client was instructed by Billy Taylor that he was needed to help with a pickup and drop off.”
McNally snorts. He’s making it sound like Taylor’s running a fast food delivery service. The real passengers could be drugs, weapons or, in this case, bodies.
“My client left his own house after getting the phone call from Taylor at around 11:40pm. He was picked up in a stolen car by three other men just before midni-”
“Names?” Ferguson requests.
“Johnny Spratt, Stuart Riddles and Lee McKay.”
Ferguson, seemingly surprised that
