Forget Me Not

Prologue

I disappeared on a Wednesday afternoon, in June, right in the middle of the heatwave. I was there one minute and the next I was gone. You might think it hard to disappear in broad daylight. To be visible and then, just seconds later, to be invisible. To have a life, and then moments later to have lost it. It wasn’t hard at all.

It was much too easy.

They found my shoes. Well, one of them, turned upside down and covered in dust. They found my car, unlocked. The driver’s window down. My keys in the ignition. My weekly shop melting and rotting in the boot. Cooking in the unspeakable heat.

They found my bag, my purse, my bank cards. My phone. The memorial card with my mother’s picture on it and some rhyming words of comfort, which were supposed to make me feel better about the fact she’d died of breast cancer in her sixties.

They found traces of blood – mine – on the ground outside. Minute droplets. They found traces of unidentified seminal fluid on the back seat, too. Not my husband’s profile. Evidence of a sexual assault, maybe?

Or maybe not.

Scuff marks on the ground, the ground kicked up. Vomit on the patchy, faded tarmac. Smeared fingerprints – mine.

Signs of a struggle.

Half a packet of Wotsits crisps, crushed into the floor of where the rear seats are. An empty Fruit Shoot bottle – blackcurrant – under the passenger seat. An ankle sock. Pink trim. A booster seat in the front of my car.

Signs I was a mother.

‘She wouldn’t leave the baby,’ they said. The baby was three. Blonde curls and blue eyes. Cupid bow lips. A dimple in her left cheek. I wouldn’t leave the baby, they were right. Not unless I had no choice.

I’d been given no choice.

Wednesday, 6 June

Chapter One

Elizabeth

Even with every window open, this house is still too warm. It’s only half past five in the morning and I know there will be no reprieve from this heatwave. It didn’t cool more than a few degrees overnight and I’ve not slept properly in days. Izzy looked at me mournfully, big brown eyes, pleading for the chance to run about outside before the heat becomes oppressive. I feel sorry for her – even though she’s shed her winter coat, it’s much too warm for her. Like me, she’s become a virtual prisoner in our home.

We’d changed our walking routine a few weeks before. Setting out early now. Before six. Doing our best to avoid the full heat of the sun, though the temperature didn’t seem to drop much overnight. This heatwave was stronger than any I remembered in my lifetime. Even warmer than 1976. That morning I was tired, though. My bones ached and I felt every one of my sixty-seven years, and then some. Still, I’d be back at home within an hour, I reasoned, and I could spend the rest of my morning doing what I had planned – baking bread for my grandchildren, who were coming here after school. I eyed the bananas on the worktop – brown spots seeming to multiply with every hour that passed. I might even throw a quick banana bread in the oven. With chocolate chips. The children would love that.

I had to leave the dough for the bread to prove for another hour anyway – wrapped in clingfilm in the airing cupboard – so I had no excuse but laziness and the persistent ache in my left arm. It hadn’t been the same since it had been broken eighteen months earlier and was, according to the doctor, unlikely to improve further. I’d just have to work through it.

‘Come on, then,’ I called to the dog, who started to wag her tail with great enthusiasm. ‘You win. Just like you always do.’

She bounced her way down the hall, deliriously happy at seeing her lead in my hand. Patting my pockets to make sure I had everything I needed with me – phone, keys, poo bags – I opened the door then watched as Izzy bounded to the end of the garden before stopping, looking back at me and waiting. She was a good dog. She made me leave the house at least once a day, which was a positive thing. I could quite happily have never left the safety of my own home. I preferred my own company. Peace and quiet. My solitary routine. But fresh air was good for body and soul. Or so they said.

I clipped Izzy’s lead to her collar and off we set along Coney Road, narrow, quiet, just far enough from the main roads of Derry to feel as if we were in the middle of nowhere. We’d walk half an hour out on the road and half an hour back, taking in some of the back roads, maybe slip into the country park for a bit.

Striding out, I didn’t put my earphones in. I preferred to be able to hear what was around me. To keep my wits about me, just in case. I doubt I posed an attractive prospect to any would-be kidnapper, rotund and in my mid-sixties, but nonetheless, you never could be too careful. People who wanted to hurt others would do so regardless.

I was glad I’d brought a bottle of water with me. It didn’t take long for me to feel too hot. I chided myself for bringing a jacket. Even though it was light, it was still too heavy for this weather. Everything was too heavy for this weather.

I slipped it off and tied it around my waist. There was a beautiful calm to the morning. The sound of birds tweeting. In a while the city would start to wake up and the rat race would begin again. I was so glad to be out of that now.

After a while, I let Izzy off the lead. She ran on, occasionally stopping to look back at me, teeth flashing a bright canine smile, before setting off again. Occasionally, she’d spot a rabbit or a bird and would speed off up the road, or into the fields to chase them – bounding as she ran. It was then I felt guilty for wanting to stay inside and not walk her. This was where she was at her happiest.

She never wandered far enough that I couldn’t see her. She’d reach a certain point and stop, then turn her head back to me as if to say: ‘Come on, old girl! Keep up.’ She’d wait patiently until I was closer, then set off again.

We walked on until she started barking, running to the hedgerow, yelping and spinning around – running back to me and back to the hedgerow again.

‘What is it, girl?’ I asked as I followed her, wondering what it was she’d uncovered this time: an old ball, ripe for throwing into the field for a prolonged game of catch, or more likely a bone, or the remains of an animal that she’d then roll in, necessitating me wrestling her into the bath when we got home.

Only as I got closer, I saw her pull at something bright. Orange. Fabric. Whatever it was, it was heavy. She pulled and struggled with it, yelping all the time. Despite the heat, I felt a chill run up my spine. I wanted to turn around and run, but Izzy was becoming more and more distressed.

The orange object took shape before my eyes. Sharpened. Came into focus. As did a hand, bluish grey. Izzy pulled back. I noticed her white paws, which just minutes before were brown with mud, were now a dark red. Her barking had become whimpering. I wanted to run but I couldn’t. I was frozen to the spot.

I pulled my phone from my pocket, took a deep breath. Forced myself to keep walking. Before I even reached the crumpled wreck of a body curled in the hedgerow, I’d dialled 999. Asked for help. Police, yes. Ambulance, yes. Was the person breathing? I didn’t know, I wasn’t close enough, but I had to be now. I had to get close. I saw a face, blue, a gaping neck wound. Fibrous tissue, muscle and cartilage all on display. An arm that lay at a strange angle. Dried blood. Fresh blood.

Surely this figure before me was dead. Surely no one could survive such butchery.

‘It’s a woman. A girl,’ I blurted down the phone.

‘Is she breathing?’ The voice on the other end of the line was the calm to my panic.

‘I don’t think so.’

I got down on my knees, repulsed by the sight in front of me but knowing I at least had to check. I had to do what I could. I bent my head down over her body, my ear to her mouth – senses primed to pick up even the slightest whisper of breath. I took her poor, cool wrist in my hand – tried to feel for a pulse. I was shaking. Trying to push away the memories of another time. Other girls. Other men. Other children. Cold and grey and mutilated. This was why I stayed away. The thumping of my heart drowned out all noise, even the yelping of the dog at my feet.

But there it was. The faintest pulse. Thready. Slow. The softest exhalation. Short. Shallow.

‘She’s alive,’ I said to the operator. ‘But only just. Be quick.’

I untied my jacket, placed it on her – as useless as it probably was. Even though it was already hot, she was so cold. The bleeding from her neck wound had been profuse but it had slowed now. I lifted the jacket, moved it and pressed against the wound, almost afraid that I’d press too hard, that my hand would slip inside it.

‘Help’s on the way,’ I said, for my own benefit as much as for that of the unknown woman in front of me. ‘If you can hang on, help is on the way. I’m Elizabeth and I’m not going to leave you. I’m going to be here until the paramedics arrive. So if you could do me a favour and just hang on, that would be great, lovey. It really would.’

I took her hand in mine. Could barely countenance how it could feel so cold and still have life in it.

‘You’re not alone,’ I told her, trying to reassure her.

I wondered who she was and who she belonged to. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. There didn’t appear to be much at all distinguishing about her. It was hard to tell the true colour of her hair, matted as it was with mud and blood. If I had to guess, I’d have put her in her mid to late thirties. But it was hard to tell given how bruised and battered she was. Her toenails were painted bright green. It looked so gaudy against the mottled, discoloured skin of her feet – the large areas of raw flesh, gravel-speckled flesh where it looked as though she’d been dragged along the ground, her ankle pointing in the wrong direction.

Someone had wanted this woman very much dead. Someone had left her here. On this quiet country lane, bleeding out.

I could hardly believe she was still alive.

‘You keep fighting,’ I told her. ‘You hold on and keep fighting.’

I was shivering then. Shock was kicking in. My muscles were seizing. I rubbed my arms, tried to release the spasms. Kept an eye out for any traffic that might pass. An ear out for the sound of sirens. Any sound of an approaching police car or ambulance.

I both wished I’d stayed at home and was grateful I was here – at least she had a chance. However small. I put my ear to her mouth again, listened for those shallow breaths. Almost imperceptible but still there. I heard a small gurgle. A rattle. The words ‘Warn them’ carried on the last of her breaths.

Then she was silent. Still.

And I could hear the sirens approaching.

Chapter Two

Rachel

I saw the news on Twitter first: ‘Body of woman found on Derry outskirts.’ It linked to a short article in the Derry Journal saying little more than the headline. Police were at the scene. The Coney Road, from Culmore Point onwards, was closed until further notice. There would be more on this story as it broke.

I felt a shiver run through me. Was it a hit and run, maybe? Oh, God, I hoped it wasn’t a paramilitary attack. No one wanted a return to those days.

No matter the reason, someone would be getting bad news. I shuddered. This woman – she could be a mother, a sister, a friend. Some poor family was about to have their whole world turned upside down.

It was just another reminder that life was short – too bloody short – and as clichéd as it sounds, we don’t know what lies around the corner for any of us. If I’d known this time last year what the following twelve months would bring I might have run away or hidden under my duvet and refused to come out.

I would have wanted to hit pause, but of course I couldn’t. The world kept turning anyway – even though I felt mine had ended with the death of my mother – sixty-five. No age at all. Breast cancer.

I hated that when I talked about her to new people now, the conversation always seemed to wind its way round to how she died. Like it defined her. That final, stupid, too-short battle. Surely everything else she’d done in her life should have mattered more?

I slid my phone back into my bag and along with it I buried my emotions for now. I had to get in front of a classroom of thirty demob-happy youngsters and keep them focused.

At lunchtime, in the staffroom, I pulled my phone from my bag again. Switched it on and looked at it. No substantial updates from the Derry Journal except a photo from the scene – dark hedgerows, bright sunshine. In the distance, beyond the bright yellow, almost festive police tape, there was an ambulance and what looked like the top of one of those white forensic police tents.

Local political representatives were expressing their ‘shock and sadness’, all of them saying it was important not to jump to conclusions until the police had more information. All the police had said so far was that the road would remain closed for some time and that they were appealing for witnesses in relation to the ‘fatality’.

‘We’re appealing for anyone who travelled along the Coney Road on the evening of 5 June or the early hours of 6 June who may have seen any unusual activity to come forward and speak to police.’

I clicked out of the link, tried to join in the chat around the table. The looming end of term meant it wasn’t just the pupils who were feeling giddy at the thought of the long summer break. Still, this news story had brought a sombre feel to the classroom.

‘It’s awful,’ I heard Mr McCallion, one of the geography teachers, say. ‘I heard, from someone who knows these things, that it looks like a murder. A particularly gruesome one at that.’

‘What?’ Ms Doherty, our young, quirky, opinionated art teacher chimed in. ‘Like, is there any kind of a murder that isn’t gruesome? The two tend to go hand in hand,’ she said with a roll of her eyes and a smile that showed she was amused at her own wit.

‘I don’t think us gossiping about it is very appropriate,’ I snapped.

I couldn’t help it. The feeling that some poor woman had lost her life shouldn’t be the subject of staffroom banter. Maybe my own grief had made me raw to it all. Ms Doherty said nothing, but the look she gave me spoke a thousand words. She thought I was a killjoy, a fuddy-duddy. Someone bereft of ‘craic’. She hadn’t known me before my mother died. Before I’d been changed, utterly.

My phone beeped again with a text message from one of my oldest friends, Julie:

Have you heard anything from Clare? She didn’t go into work today. I called round her flat but there was no answer and her phone is off. You know, it’s not like her – and there’s been that woman found …

Julie was always prone to drama and tended to jump directly to the worst possible conclusion about everything, but this time a nagging, sickening feeling started to wash over me. Julie, Clare and I had remained the very best of friends after we’d left school. While I’d trained to teach English, they’d both joined the Civil Service and worked for the Pensions Department on Duke Street. They didn’t do anything without the other knowing.

I immediately tried calling Clare myself, I don’t know why. I hoped for some sort of rational and reasonable explanation as to why she wouldn’t have got Julie’s call. When it went straight to answer service, I wondered who else I could call to try to find her. It would be a bit hysterical to call the hospital, wouldn’t it? I mean, she was a grown woman. She could be anywhere. She might be with her parents. Out with another friend. She’d been seeing someone lately, someone she’d admitted to developing deep feelings for. She could be lying in post-coital bliss in his bed right now, being decadent and loved-up for once in her up-to-now sensible life. I almost envied her, if she was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been post-coital anything, never mind blissed-out.

I was about to call Julie back, when my phone rang and her name popped up on the screen. I answered, said hello, expected her to tell me Clare had just rolled into work, hungover but happy.

I hadn’t expected the breathless, sobbing, gasping, almost screaming cry of my friend.

‘It’s her, Rachel. It’s Clare. She’s dead.’

Chapter Three

Elizabeth

I was sitting in front of the kitchen range, shaking. I winced at the sweetness of the tea I’d been given for the shock.

I had just been too late. Even if I’d got to her an hour before, it would probably still have been too late to save her. She shouldn’t really have survived for as long as she did – her wounds were so severe.

‘Mrs O’Loughlin, if we can just go over your statement one more time,’ the kindly-faced police officer said to me.

He’d been lovely. So gentle in his manner. So sorry for what I’d been through, even though I wasn’t the victim here. Not at all.

‘I’m not sure I’ve anything more to tell you,’ I said, placing the cup on the kitchen table, the shake in my hand more pronounced than it normally was. ‘I can’t think of anything more.’

My brain was trying to process the trauma. I knew that. In my younger years I’d worked as a theatre nurse. Cared for many survivors of catastrophic traumas – the de facto warzone that Derry had been during the Troubles meant I saw more than most. Heard more than most. Lost limbs, blast wounds, burns, gunshots, a child who couldn’t be saved, whose body was broken beyond repair by the impact of a car bomb.

Images were coming at me now. Fast. Horrific. I shook my head to try to get rid of them, but they didn’t go. They wouldn’t go and now I had these flashes of that woman, her orange T-shirt and linen trousers – blood-soaked, mud-soaked, wet through. Her eyes, flickering, closed. That wound, jagged, vicious, intentional. The soft warmth of her last breath on my cheek. How gentle it had been for someone who was taken from the world so violently.

‘And you saw no traces of anyone else along the road? No cars passed as you were out walking?’

I shook my head. It had been so quiet. Blissfully quiet.

‘It’s a quiet road at the best of times, especially at that hour of the morning,’ I told him as one of his colleagues offered to refill my teacup.

‘I imagine,’ he said. ‘And she just said those two words? Warn them? Nothing more at all?’

‘Well, my hearing isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but no, DI Bradley, she didn’t say anything else. I don’t think she had the strength. The poor girl. Do they know who she is yet? Who she belongs to? Her poor, poor family.’

‘I believe they think they’ve identified her,’ he said, his soft blue eyes sad. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t give you any further information until she’s been formally identified by a family member. You know how it is.’

I nodded. I did, indeed, know how it is, and how it was. I’d stood with family members myself as they’d identified bodies of their loved ones. A matter of procedure. A formality that sometimes felt unspeakably cruel.

‘And you’ve never seen this woman before?’

I shook my head, rubbed my arm to try to ease the aching muscles. ‘I don’t often get out and about, apart from walking Izzy there. My health isn’t what it used to be. And I don’t tend to bump into too many people when I’m around these roads and fields.’

The handsome DI Bradley nodded again, closed his notebook and sat back in his chair.

‘Mrs O’Loughlin, I appreciate this has been exceptionally traumatic for you, but we really appreciate your time and the information you’ve been able to give us. Have you any family members who can call over and sit with you? You’ve had quite a shock.’

‘My son-in-law will be visiting later. He always comes on a Wednesday with my grandchildren. Makes sure I’ve everything I need.’

That reminded me that that bread was still proving in the airing cupboard and the bananas were still overripe in the bowl. I didn’t have the energy left in me to make banana bread any more. The children would have to make do with fresh bread and jam. It had been good enough for their mother when she was little.

He handed me a card with his details. Told me to call him if I could think of anything else. Any detail at all.

‘If there’s any way we can be a support to you then please get in touch. We’ll have someone from victim support get in touch to talk to you about your experience, help you through the trauma.’

‘Detective Bradley, victim support have no need to be wasting their limited resources on me. I’m tougher than I look, you know!’

He smiled. ‘Well, I imagine you are, especially with all the help you’ve given to people in the past, but we all need a little help from time to time,’ he said.

I didn’t argue. There was little point. But I knew I wouldn’t talk to anyone from victim support. I’d just file the horror of this morning’s find with all the other horrors in my mind. They were my cross to carry.

Chapter Four

Rachel

I moved through the early afternoon in a haze. I considered crying off to the head but what good would that have done? I’d just have ended up sitting and thinking about the unthinkable. Not that staying in my classroom stopped that. As much as I tried to focus on my work, I couldn’t. It was stupid of me to ever think that I could have.

My friend was dead. Someone I’d known for thirty years, from the first day we’d sat together on the newly polished floor of the assembly hall in St Catherine’s College, our too-big green pinafores and coats swamping us as we nervously waited to be divided into our form groups.

We’d clicked over a mutual dislike of geography and Kylie Minogue, and we’d stayed friends since. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets, but we were there for each other through everything life threw at us. When Julie had postnatal depression, when Clare’s marriage had crumbled just days before her third wedding anniversary and when I’d fallen to pieces after the death of my mother. The girls had held me up, literally at one stage, as grief took the legs out from under me and I’d fainted. They’d welcomed the steady stream of mourners to our home, directed them to where my mother’s body lay so that they could pay their respects and then offered a cup of tea afterwards. They’d made sure everything ran smoothly, while I’d sat, ashen-faced and bowed with grief, by the side of the coffin, unwilling to move – struggling to let go of my beloved mother.

How could it be that Clare was gone now? That her body had been found by the side of a road? The police weren’t saying murder yet and I hoped, perhaps naively, that it wasn’t murder. That it was an accident. Although I couldn’t think of any possible excuse for her being on that road, alone in the early hours of the morning.

I didn’t know how she’d died. Didn’t know when she’d died. All manner of horrors kept dancing through my head until I couldn’t hold in my pain and my fear any more. I simply lifted my bag, left my Year 12s open-mouthed and walked out of the classroom midway through a discussion on the book Of Mice and Men.

I walked to the head’s office, my legs shaking – the grief hitting me from the ground upwards, weakening me, diminishing me.

‘You’ll have to send someone to deal with my Year 12s,’ I muttered. ‘I’ve got to go home. I’ve had bad news.’

Sheila, my deputy head, looked me up and down. ‘Are you okay, Rachel?’

I didn’t trust myself to speak. I didn’t want to say the words. It was so completely, utterly, surreal. You never expect to have to say those words to anyone. Those are words for TV shows and movies, not for school offices on sunny June days as the school secretary eats an ice cream and talks about her forthcoming holiday.

I just shook my head as a surge of something powerful, painful and overwhelming rose up inside me. She was dead. My friend. I’d be sitting by her coffin next. And if Mr McCallion was right, it was a ‘gruesome murder’.

The shock rose up inside me until I had to run from the room to the staff toilets and throw up until I could barely breathe.

I was aware of someone, Sheila most probably, behind me. I was embarrassed she’d hear me retching, sobbing and trying not to scream. She sat down beside me, put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me into a hug. It should have been awkward. It certainly wasn’t professional. But it was just what I needed in that moment. It gave me time to find my breath again, to slow the shaking.

‘That body,’ I told her. ‘The one found this morning? It’s a friend of mine. One of my oldest friends.’ I stumbled over my words. My tongue felt too big in my mouth. The sentences too alien. ‘People are saying it’s a murder, Sheila.’

She hugged me a little closer, told me that of course I could go, but she wasn’t happy about letting me drive given that I’d had such a shock.

‘Do you want to call Paul?’ she asked.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to call my husband. I wanted, no, needed to go and see Julie. She was the only other person who could possibly understand.

‘I need to see my friend. Our friend. Julie. She works with Clare. Worked. I suppose. We all went to school