Kate Thompson - That Gallagher Girl

‘Oh, Raoul! I’d love to live on a houseboat!’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Raoul picked up the wine bottle. ‘Here. Have some more Château Whatever.’

Raoul was as good as his word. Straightaway, he put in a call to his mate Aidan, and sorted Cat out with her brand new home from the place she couldn’t call home. And by the time they’d finished the bottle and left the house the way they’d come in and hit the main road, Cat was feeling buoyant and full of hope.

‘Bye, Raoul,’ she said, as the twice-weekly bus to Galway appeared over the brow of the hill, and drew up by the turn-off to Hugo’s house. ‘You are my fairy half-brother.’

‘Less of the fairy, thanks. I’ll be in touch.’

Cat hugged Raoul the way she never hugged anybody else, and watched him board the bus.

‘Here,’ he said, taking something from his backpack and tossing it to her. ‘You may need this.’ He gave her a final salute, then the bus door slid shut and he was gone.

In her hand, Cat was clutching the screwdriver she’d used to gain access to the showhouse. She smiled, and turned towards the path that would take her to the house in the forest, the house that she hoped soon to leave. As she passed through the gate and rounded the first bend, a voice from behind her hissed: ‘Cat! Cat! Here, Kitty Cat!’

She swung round as they emerged from the trees. There were three of them. They were wearing stocking masks and stupid grins. One said, ‘A little bird told me it was your birthday, Kitty Cat. Come here to us now, like a good girl, and let us give you your birthday present.’

Without pausing for thought, Cat aimed the first kick.

Chapter One

Río Kinsella thought that she had never seen an uglier building. Constructed from precast concrete, it was veined with fissures and topped with a corrugated roof of some leprous-looking material. The grey steel shutters clamped over the doors and windows lent it a hostile expression. On the forecourt, dandelions clumped, and amorphous masses of machinery lay rusting. The place would make an ideal location for one of those murky Scandinavian thrillers.

Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she extracted an email printout.

Río – finally found what I’ve been looking for! It’s a working oyster farm – OK, I know that hardly fits my boyhood dream of becoming a fisherman, but it’s the next best thing! Might you have a gander at it for me? It’s a mile or so along the beach from the Villa Felicity – or whatever the place is called now – you probably know it? The guy who sold it to me is from Kerry, and inherited it from his uncle. There’s a cottage with it – he said he’d leave the key in O’Toole’s so you could check it out. (I’ve a feeling it might be in need of your interior design skills!) I’m very excited by this – it’s come up at just the right time!

Your friend, Adair.

PS: Will be bringing you back a present from Dubai – can’t say I’ll be sorry to leave!

Oh, God. There was something so boyish, so affecting about all those exclamation marks!

Río folded the printout and slid it back into her pocket, then turned in the direction of the path that would take her from the packing shed to the cottage. It wasn’t a cottage by definition, she knew – more a bog-standard bungalow. But hey – any single-storey dwelling on the west coast of Ireland called itself a cottage these days. The word ‘cottage’ had cosier connotations than ‘bungalow’, and stood a better chance of attracting the attention of potential buyers. The fact that this property came with an oyster farm attached, however, meant that offers were unlikely to be forthcoming. Who would be crazy enough to buy an oyster farm in the current economic climate? She wondered how much Adair had paid for it. She wondered if he had been suckered.

Adair Bolger was a shrewd businessman – there was no doubt about that. Or he had been. During the reign of the rampant Celtic Tiger he had bought and sold and prospered with the most pugnacious of Ireland’s property barons. He had made headlines in the finance sections of the broad-sheets, and in the gossip columns of the glossies. But when it came to his personal affairs, Adair was purblind. He had spent millions building a holiday home for his (now ex-) wife Felicity during the boom years, but sold it for a bargain-basement price when the market imploded. He had acquired a pair of penthouses in Dublin’s docklands as pieds-à-terre for himself and his daughter (plus a couple more as investments), but these castles in the air were now languishing unoccupied and unsellable. He had escaped to Dubai to regroup just as the tentacles of economic malaise had started to besmirch the gleaming canopy of the world’s construction capital. Like hundreds of other Irish Icaruses, Adair Bolger had flown too high, had his wings scorched, and plummeted back down to earth. As he would put it himself, he was bollixed.

And now Adair wanted Río to help him realise his dream of downshifting, and living off the fat of the land or – to be more accurate – the fruits of the sea. An oyster farm, for feck’s sake! Did he have a clue what oyster farming involved? Did he know that it was backbreaking, knucklegrazing work, work that had to be carried out in all seasons and in all weather conditions – mostly inclement because of the ‘R’ in the month thing? Did he know that demand for oysters had plummeted since recession had struck? Or that oyster farms on the coasts of all four provinces of Ireland were foreclosing, their owners emigrating? Río pictured the lucky Kerryman who’d sold Adair the property chortling up his sleeve like a pantomime villain, and rubbing his hands with glee as he cashed Adair’s cheque.

The cottage and its outbuildings were hidden away in a quiet estuary of Coolnamara Bay. The man who had owned the farm had been a loner known as Madser, who had stockpiled junk and bred fighting dogs. On the rare occasions he sallied forth into Lissamore village, it was astride the ancient Massey Ferguson that he used to tow his shellfish to his packing shed, exhaust fumes spewing into the clean Coolnamara air and settling on the produce heaped on the trailer behind him. Locals used to joke that Madser’s were the only diesel-smoked oysters in the world.

Today was the first time that Río had ventured beyond the sign that read ‘Trespasers Prosecuted’ since the days when, as a child, she had routinely flouted Madser’s misspelt warning. In those days, the local kids scored points for bravado every time they crawled under the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the property, daring one another to venture further and further up the lane until the barking of Madser’s dogs became so frenzied that even the bravest of them had turned tail and fled. The dogs – or the descendants of those dogs – had been put down, Río had learned, when their master died.

Their legacy lived on in the form of the denuded meat bones that strewed the backyard of the house. Sweet Jesus, this was a cheerless place! Surely Adair had seen photographs of it online and read the implausible sales blurb? No amount of Photoshopping could disguise its intrinsic ugliness, no estate agent’s spiel convince that this property didn’t come with a big ‘BUYER BEWARE!’ sticker on it. Río wondered for the umpteenth time what had possessed him to buy it.

Skirting a pile of rusty bicycle parts, she negotiated the mud track that led to the back door, glad that she was wearing her wellies. She didn’t need the key, she realised, as she went to insert it in the lock: the door was ajar. Oh, God. This was the bit in the horror film, the bit where you peek through your fingers and tell the stupid girl not to go in there, the bit where you get ready to jump.