Before Karen mangled him, Simon Whelan was a stable individual with a happy family life. He was a leading psychiatrist at the mental health clinic where they both worked with a GP wife, teenage twin boys, a Cheshire farmhouse and a holiday home on the Algarve. Six months into the affair, he abandoned it all to move into Victoria Road with her and Alexia.
I met him a couple of times. He was her type, older and married, but not particularly attractive. Short and squat, he had an untidy mop of grey-white hair, watery blue eyes and a slight squint. But after a few hours in his company, I could see the attraction. He didn’t say much but what he did say was worth hearing. He was witty, highly informed yet very unassuming. But as soon as I spotted the devoted way his eyes followed Karen around the room, I knew the relationship was doomed. True to form she dumped him a year later. She never went into the details of what exactly happened but Simon had a breakdown and he lost his job. His wife eventually had him back, a broken man by all accounts. She’d sold the house in the meantime and downsized to a flat in Didsbury. His boys took it badly, turning up at Karen’s house and threatening her and Alexia a number of times.
We only ever talked about what happened once at her place. I was sitting at the kitchen table and she was sitting on the floor in the corner next to Springer Bell’s bed. He’d just had a minor operation on his leg and she was fussing over him. She seemed removed, almost dismissive of the turmoil her affair with Simon had caused and more concerned about the welfare of her dog. Karen had a tornado effect on men. She sped through their lives leaving chaos and destruction behind. I’d seen it all before. I’d listened to the ins and outs of her turbulent love life for years without judgement or criticism. But that day I spoke up.
Eying her sternly, I tapped my fingers on the table. “Have you no remorse at all? That poor bloke lost his mind. His career’s gone and his family have lost their home.”
She looked taken aback. “I didn’t force Simon to leave his family.”
“So you take no blame at all for what happened?”
She fed Springer a biscuit. “No, Carmel, I don’t. Simon wasn’t a victim. He made his own choices. It simply didn’t work out.”
I shook my head. “You are so fucked up.”
She threw me a murderous look. “Just listen to you with your perfect marriage!”
Then she tightened her arms around Springer and we never spoke about Simon Whelan again.
Karen’s issues with men obviously had something to do with her dad Hassan’s abandonment of her and Dee before she was born. Dee’s dodgy lifestyle can’t have helped either. Karen tracked Hassan down shortly after Alexia was born. He’d moved to Nigeria. Curious to meet his only grandchild, he paid for them both to fly out and stay in his luxury beachside villa in Lagos. Karen lasted three days. She moved to a hotel where she rang me, livid, ranting on about his entourage of women and shady business dealings. She never said as much but I guessed he was some kind of pimp. She showed me a photo of him on her return. He was a mountain of a man and was leaning against an E-type Jag, surrounded by palm trees and blue skies. Dressed in a white suit and lilac open-necked shirt, he had her smile.
She scowled down at the picture. “My gangster daddy,” she said. “Was it any wonder my mother took to drink?”
The male role models in Karen’s life had certainly let her down but I suspected her inability to commit lay elsewhere. In her eyes, unrequited love seemed the only true kind. She was an addiction counsellor with a dependency of her own. She was addicted to men she couldn’t have.
While I was waiting for Karen to return, I got out my phone and checked my Ryanair app for flights to Knock. I hugged myself at the thought of a trip to Mayo and the recent developments. As they said in the crime dramas, I now had a solid lead to go on.
When Karen arrived back she looked flushed and distracted.
I scrutinised her face. “Everything OK?”
She nodded and looked away. She’d barely sat down when I reached into my bag and thrust a sheet of paper at her. It was one of the articles I’d photocopied about the mass grave in the Tuam home.
“Have a read of that,” I said, sitting back and crossing my legs.
Frowning, she looked down at the article, her face twisting and contorting as she read.
“Sweet Jesus,” she said when she’d finished. She handed it back, holding it between finger and thumb like it was contaminated. “So Tess definitely had her baby there?”
“I’m pretty sure of it. According to Dad’s letter she would have given birth to the baby in late 1960 and it was the only Mother and Baby Home in the area. It closed down in 1961.”
“Please tell me she never knew about any of this.”
“Hard to know. There wasn’t much about it in the news here at that time. Most of the reports came later on after she died.”
She scratched her jaw. “Let me get this right. So pregnant girls and women were put into the homes and forced to give their babies up for adoption. The government paid the nuns money to look after the kids that weren’t adopted. But the nuns kept the money and neglected and starved them and then when they died they threw their
