Brian McGilloway: Borderlands

I went over to the bouquets at the base of the tree, reading the cards attached with grim curiosity. There was a bunch left by the Cashell girls. Sadie had left an old battered teddy bear with "From Mummy and Daddy with love" written on a piece of foolscap tucked into the ribbon around its neck. The whole thing reminded me of the fairy trees people used to talk about in the west of Donegal. Locals would tie talismans of some sort around the tree and in return, the fairies would bless them. The base of this tree was covered with Mass cards and rosary beads, sympathy cards and flowers. Among them I saw a photograph, clearly taken decades earlier. In it, a young woman was sitting on a set of concrete steps. Behind her, I could see children playing on a beach. I assumed the woman was a grandmother of Angela's and replaced the photograph, tucking it behind a vine of ivy that snaked up around the hunk of the tree. I read a few more of the messages, laying each card gently onto the bed of damp moss at the tree's base.

Days later I would still feel saddened by the simplicity of Sadie's message; what else could adequately convey a parental emotion so instinctive it could barely be expressed?

When I arrived at her house, Sadie was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair on her front door-step, smoking a cigarette and talking to her neighbour, who leaned across the hedge that divided their two houses, The neighbour, Jim something-or-other, nodded towards me as I got out of the car and I heard him say, "Hey Sadie, someone's brought home the bacon."

I wanted to tell him to screw himself, but nodded politely and smiled. Sadie stood up as I approached and walked into the house, leaving the door open, which I took to be as close to a sign of hospitality as I was going to get.

The two younger daughters were sitting at the kitchen table, almost exactly as I had last seen them and, I noticed, in the same clothes. Both looked up from their play when I came in, then returned to their dolls. Sadie was standing at the stove, removing a fresh cigarette from the packet on the worktop beside her.

"Have I not enough to be bothering me? What do you want?"

She leaned over the stove, removing a pot from a gas ring and lighting her cigarette from the flame. She had to drag at it several times to get it lit, billows of smoke mingling with the steam from the pots which left her face damp and flushed.

"I've a few questions, Sadie. About Angela. If you're feeling up to it."

"The fuck you care if I'm up to it. That bastard's gone and got himself nicked again. Two days shy of Christmas. What am I meant to do? Eh?" She sat down, a tacit recognition that, try as she might to blame me, she knew I was not the architect of her misfortunes. I sat opposite her, studying her face.

She had always been a fairly heavy woman, her chestnut brown hair tied back from her face. It had lost its lustre now, and the deep brown, which once had resembled a mare's mane, was streaked with white and dirty grey. Her skin was weathered as leather, peppered with burst blood vessels. In another life, with another husband perhaps, she could have been attractive in a way, but life with Johnny Cashell had taken its toll on her. She looked significantly older than her forty-seven years. I had never seen her look more dejected in my life. I opened my wallet and took out three 50 euro notes that I had withdrawn from the bank machine that morning in order to buy Debbie's Christmas present. Sadie watched me with open suspicion.

"Sadie, we had a whip-round at the station, seeing as all that's happened the past week to you. Take this to tide you over Christmas."

Her initial response was indignation and anger, though I assured her that it was not charity as such, but simply a contribution to help her over a bad patch. Slowly, and without thanks, she took the money, folded the notes once and slipped them under the fruit bowl. Then she gestured towards me without discernible reason, which I assumed to be a sign of her assent to the interview. I looked at the two girls, not wishing to speak in front of them, but Sadie, wafting the smoke from in front of her face, said, "It's okay. They don't understand anyway."

"Sadie," I began, still glancing at the girls uncomfortably, "we think Angela took a fit of some kind-"

"Is that what killed her? A fit?"

"We don't know. We're fairly certain that at some time before she died she went into a seizure. Was she epileptic? Did she take Ills?"

"Never. But then, if she had a fit, she weren't murdered. A fit's not murder, is it?" For a moment a spark of hope seemed to flicker in her eyes, as though the means of Angela's death could somehow after the final outcome.

"We don't know, Sadie. She never took fits?"

"Never."

"Was she on medication of any kind?"

"No. She were on iron for a while, months back, but not now."

"What did her iron tablets look like Sadie – in case maybe she look some recently and you didn't know?"

"Why? What difference do iron tablets have to make?"

"Just clearing some things up. Can I see her tablets?"

"Muire, run up and fetch them tablets from the bathroom, love," Sadie said, and the younger of the two girls – the girl whom I had thought was going to speak on my last visit – ran up the stairs, her footfalls thudding across the ceiling above us.

While I waited for her to return, I promised Sadie that we would bring Angela to them as soon as possible. "And her belongings, Sadie. You'll want that gold ring back, I'm sure," I said, remembering the ring Angela had been wearing.

"What gold ring? She didn't wear no gold rings."

"Are you sure? She was wearing a gold ring with some kind of stone in it. It looked expensive."

She paused for a fraction of a second too long before responding, "Oh, right. Aye. That ring. Aye. I forgot about that. Bought it herself, she did."

But I knew she was lying. Angela didn't wear a gold ring and Sadie was chancing her arm for a piece of jewellery she didn't own.

A more important issue, though, was where, then, the ring had come from. A boyfriend or lover perhaps? The lover who had had sex with her before she died and who was, presumably, the last person to see her alive and, logically, therefore, her killer?

Muire returned with the tablets. They were red and green in a plastic coating and looked nothing like the description of the tablet discovered in Angela's stomach.

"Sadie, could you ask the girls to leave? I have one or two more questions," I said.

"Go'on out and play wi' yourselves," she said and the two girls left with their dolls.

"Did Angela have a boyfriend?" I asked.

"Probably. She were a lovely looking girl."

"You don't know any names, Sadie?"

"No."

"What about Whitey McKelvey?"

"Are you joking? You're as bad as that ignoramus I married. She wouldn't have spat on McKelvey if he was on fire." She paused briefly as she realized how inappropriate her choice of words had been.

"Then why did Johnny go after him? They were seen together. Might she have been seeing him without you knowing?"

"I'm telling you. Whatever she was meeting McKelvey for, it weren't boyfriend stuff."

"Do you know where she stayed on Thursday night? Johnny said he hadn't seen her since Thursday, yet we know she was with your girls on Friday at the cinema. I'm a little confused, Sadie."

Sadie paused and I sensed there was something she didn't want to get drawn on. "She stayed with one of her friends; I don't know who. Then she met the girls at the cinema on Friday and that's that."

"Where did she go after the cinema?"

"A friend's, I suppose. Is this not what you're meant to be finding out yourself?"

"Why did she stay away on Thursday night?"

"Girls do these things. Wanted to visit her friend and have one of those American things – sleep-over things." She knew as well as I did that the answer was a weak one.