One Bad Turn

by Sinéad Crowley

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Female Sleuths; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

How could your good friend become your worst enemy? I lost my child because of you, my only child. Eileen and Heather have always looked out for each other. But two years ago Eileen lost her son and she blames Heather and her family for the tragic loss. And I want you to know how that feels. Now she wants Heather and her daughter to suffer in the same way. Sergeant Claire Boyle is caught in the crossfire - but she has her own child to think about now.

Release date: June 1, 2017

Publisher: Quercus

Print pages: 400

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

There was no need to think about where she was going: her feet knew the way. Down the path, out of the gate, a right turn when she reached the pavement. There was no need to make any plans or decisions. Leah just needed to run.

And to think, a little over a year ago, she hadn’t been able to jog for more than five minutes without nearly collapsing. God, the state of her! It made her totally cringe just to think of how pathetic she’d been. Barely able to reach the end of the road without bending over, crippled by a stitch, red-faced, sweating and terrified she’d bump into someone she knew. Now, lacing up her trainers and getting moving had become, quite simply, the best part of Leah Gilmore’s day. Not that she’d ever admit that to her mother, of course. The old dear would ratchet up even more points on the smug scale, and that was the last thing she needed.

Ignoring the red man on the crossing signal, Leah hopped off the kerb and ran across the empty road without breaking stride, relishing the smoothness of her movements and the way her body seemed to be operating exactly as it was designed to. At least one part of her had its shit together. Everything else in Leah’s life was a total mess. She had no money, no college place, no one to hang out with now her friends were all busy settling into their new lives. There were no jobs in Fernwood for someone with her lack of experience and references, and her mother had made it quite clear that an allowance was, for the moment at least, out of the question: ‘Not after the way you spent it last time. Come back to me next year and we can discuss it again.’

A year. That was what her mum insisted Leah needed to get her life back in order. A year of studying, living quietly at home and watching TV every night, sharing a sofa with her mother and that pain in the arse she’d married. After that, her mum said, Leah could start again. Go to college, meet up with her old friends or make new ones. It would only take twelve months. ‘Nothing, in the scheme of things,’ she kept saying. Leah wondered if her mother realized how ancient that made her sound. Twelve months seemed a hell of a long time to her. The trouble was, though, she had no option other than to go along with her mother’s wishes. After all, as she kept reminding her, there was no plan B.

Don’t think. Keep running.

Leah raised her head slightly, enjoying the slight sting of the salt air as it flowed into her nostrils, the breeze from the bay deliciously cool against her cheeks. Her earbuds were in place but she hadn’t turned any music on, not yet, preferring to let the soft slap of her feet against the pavement dictate her rhythm.

Keep running.

A car passed, a hand waved. Leah couldn’t see the driver, but nodded anyway. It was most likely a friend of her mother’s, or the mother of a friend. That was how it was in a village like Fernwood. You couldn’t sneeze in your kitchen without somebody two doors down asking about your cold. Leah had lived in Fernwood for all of her nineteen years, in the same house for the first sixteen, and now she was back there again, dependent on her mother and stepdad for everything, like some little kid. One day she’d get away but, for the moment, running around the block would have to do.

Slap-pad, slap-pad. She speeded up as she passed the steps to the beach, but the boy’s face still popped into her head, like it always did at this point in the run. Just as quickly, she shoved the memory aside. Obsessing over what had happened wouldn’t change anything. At least that was something Leah and her mum could agree on. There was no point in thinking about Alan Delaney any more. Much better to forget him and to move forward. To run.

The sea wall grew higher and Leah’s stride lengthened as the its shadow cooled the air. She curved round a woman pushing a buggy, moved further into the wall to avoid a man walking a dog, then passed a yellow sign and allowed herself a slight smile. A year ago those yellow one-kilometre ‘heart health’ markers had seemed to be taunting her, reminding her only of how unfit she was. Now she regularly passed seven in the space of a morning’s session. It was amazing, really, what training every day could do for you. Plus no drink and no fags, of course. And having absolutely fuck-all else to do.

Keep running.

She ran for five more minutes along by the sea wall, then four, then three, then two, then reached the traffic lights and moved back east across the road. Her back was to the bay now, her stride shortening as she began the long, slow climb towards the base of Kennockmore Hill. The footpath was narrower but there were fewer pedestrians to dodge. People didn’t walk up Kennockmore Hill: they aimed their SUVs at electronic gates and clicked themselves into their homes.

Keep running.

Leah’s breath was coming in short pants now, her cheeks rosy as she navigated the hill.

‘Duration, four kilometres.’

The mechanical voice from her running app helped urge her on. She’d share the achievement on Facebook when she’d finished. Until a year ago every picture had shown her and her friends duck-faced and pouting, bottles in their hands, smeared glasses on the tables in front of them. Arms held at an angle to emphasize their waists, boobs stuck forward into the camera lens. Leah couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a night out like that, or been tagged in someone else’s photograph. Posting about her runs proved she was still alive.

A sharp pain stabbed her knee, but she ran through it and it dulled after a minute. Leah knew better than to stop on that part of the climb – if she did, it would be too hard to get going again. Instead, she slowed her breathing and used her elbows to jab her way through the air. She was running so slowly now that she was able to close her eyes for a second, concentrate on the way the muscles in her back contracted under the sports bra. She felt the sweat soak into her clothes, one drip escaping and splashing onto the concrete below. Felt the bad luck of the year go with it.

Lost in thought, she didn’t realize how far she’d come until she reached the entrance to the car park. Brilliant. She was more than halfway up the slope now with most of the hard work behind her. For the first time Leah allowed herself to look up to where the top of Kennockmore Hill loomed over her. If she squinted she could even see the Victorian folly on top, where at weekends Spanish students asked locals to take their photo, Dublin Bay sparkling behind them. Today, midweek, it would be quieter – there would be only a couple of dog-walkers up there, or one of Fernwood’s better-known residents taking a ramble on a day when they were unlikely to be hassled for a selfie. The number of singers and film stars who had made Fernwood their home had earned it the title of Dublin’s ‘rockbroker belt’. In the past, the sheer numbers of well-known residents in the village had allowed them to hang together and create a semblance of a private life, but the advent of the camera phone had made that far more difficult, even halfway up Kennockmore Hill. It was almost impossible, these days, to keep anything offline.

No – don’t go there, Leah, don’t think. Just run.

‘Duration, five kilometres.’

Fantastic. Leah almost thanked the lady on her running app out loud, then laughed at herself and looked up again. If things were different she’d love to tackle the hill itself, buy herself some proper mountain running gear, scramble to the top via one of the side routes, kicking stones and branches out of her way. She would never be able to do that, though, any more than she’d be able to run through the wavelets on Rua Strand, far below. Too many memories, and all the banging on about ‘positive thinking’ her mother did could only get her so far. So, no, she wouldn’t be running up the hill any time soon. As long as she stuck to the path she was on, though, she’d be fine.

The pavement was curving downwards now, following the base of the hill, and Leah felt the tension in her muscles ease, her weight fall forward slightly. She was coming up to the entrance to the children’s playground. After that the road would take a steep turn downwards and she’d be flying. She’d be home in twenty minutes, maybe, and, yeah, perhaps she should enter a race or something, like her dad was always telling her to do; nothing major, just a five k, just something to test herself against, it would be nice to have something to— Jesus Christ! The blow to her side almost pushed her over and her arms flailed as her feet scrabbled for purchase on the ground. But the elderly lady wasn’t so lucky – she’d gone down hard and Leah had to pitch to one side to avoid falling on top of her.

‘Oh, my God! Are you all right?’

Leah dropped to her knees. The gravel underneath her stung, but she was so panicked she barely felt it. Christ – she’d been sprinting, hadn’t even seen the woman who had walked out of a small pedestrian gate. She hadn’t hit her head, had she? Or broken a hip? The woman, grey curls in disarray under a purple felt hat, was lying on the ground, facing away from her.

‘Oh, my God,’ Leah repeated. Even though ‘Not again’ was what she really wanted to say.

Please, not again. Don’t let somebody else die, I couldn’t bear it. But the words wouldn’t form. Instead, she reached out one hand and touched the woman on the shoulder.

‘Are you?’

‘Mam!’

Leah turned in relief to see a tall, dark-haired man looming over them.

‘Mam, are you okay?’

‘Oh, thank God.’

She scrambled to her feet and squinted at him. The man had jumped out of a red Hiace van. In his panic he’d left the engine running and the sliding door at the side stood wide open.

‘I didn’t even see her – I think she’s hurt.’

But the man ignored her, just bent over his mother and touched her on the shoulder.

‘Come on now, Mam, we’ll get you back in the van.’

‘Maybe we should call an ambulance—’

Leah’s words disappeared as the man turned and delivered a quick jab to her stomach. Winded, taken utterly by surprise, she stumbled backwards. In one swift moment he picked up her legs and tossed her into the open vehicle.

‘She’s in – move.’

The woman wasn’t old at all, Leah saw, as she lay on the floor of the van, her mouth open, too winded even to scream. She was only her mother’s age, wearing a wig. And now she couldn’t see her at all because the man was standing in the door, blocking her from view.

‘This is for Alan Delaney,’ he snarled at her. And then he slammed the door.

Leah’s last thought, before a sharp turn flung her onto her side and drove everything but wild panic from her mind, was that of a toddler, lost in a department store:

Mummy, please find me. I want to go home.

CHAPTER TWO

Claire was so surprised by the tears that they stopped almost as soon as they’d started.

‘I’m so sorry – I just don’t know what’s wrong with me today.’

Crying in the doctor’s surgery. What was she like? She’d want to cop on to herself. But the doctor said nothing, just handed over a tissue and sat back in her chair. She didn’t even have to look for the box of Kleenex, just reached down and found it straight away. Weeping women must be an occupational hazard in a GP’s world.

‘You must be exhausted. You’ve a lot going on.’

The doctor’s voice was quiet but authoritative. Not overly friendly, but not too brisk either, although Claire’s was her last appointment of the morning. She was probably anxious to close the surgery and get home. Just pragmatic, and in total control. It was this air of competence that had kept Claire coming back to her surgery, years after she and Matt had moved to another side of the city. Dr Heather Gilmore was a woman you could trust. A woman whom you felt would always figure out the best thing to do.

‘I’m sorry. I feel very foolish.’

‘Not at all. You can always come back in a few days, you know. There’s no need to make any decision now.’

Her head dipped slightly and Claire noticed, not for the first time, how even Dr Gilmore’s hair seemed to behave with absolute decorum. On most people the tight curls would have looked untidy, but each strand on the doctor’s head seemed to be the exact same length, colour and texture, and the curls dropped around her slightly too thin face as if they had been cut using a set square. Despite her air of calm, however, she couldn’t resist taking a quick look at her watch, and Claire knew it was time to go. She would gather her thoughts elsewhere.

From the buggy by the door came a soft, but strangely adult-sounding snore. Claire smiled, despite her misery. At least one thing had worked out as she’d planned it. When the childminder had phoned in sick that morning, Claire’s first instinct had been to cancel her visit to the doctor. She didn’t want to conduct the most sensitive of conversations with her newly mobile eighteen-month-old daughter poking at whatever dangerous equipment was lying around the surgery. But her appointment was too urgent to be put off for another day. So, she’d fed Anna a huge breakfast and sung all the way over in the car, keeping her awake until just before her appointment time. The plan had worked perfectly. Snuggled in her buggy, the little girl had fallen asleep in the waiting room and would stay that way for at least another hour, leaving her mother plenty of time to go somewhere quiet, have a coffee, sort her head out. Make the decision that needed to be made.

‘So – we’ll leave it there, then, for the moment.’

The note of impatience in the doctor’s voice was subtle, but Claire wasn’t stupid. She scrubbed at her eyes with a tissue.

‘I’ll give you a call,’ Dr Gilmore added.

Claire gave a watery smile, then both women started when the doorbell buzzed.

This time, the doctor didn’t bother to hide her irritation.

‘I close up at one. All of the patients know it.’

But the buzz came again, longer this time, and the doctor rose to her feet.

‘I’d better see what they want.’

Claire, suddenly conscious of her reddened nose and swollen eyes, stood up too and looked round the room. She hadn’t cried in public for at least twenty years and didn’t feel like being stared at by some stranger now.

‘Is there somewhere I can freshen up?’

‘Bathroom’s through there.’

Distracted, the doctor jerked her head in the direction of a door, which was half hidden by a screen at the back of the room.

Walking over, Claire pushed it open and saw that, rather than opening into a back yard, as she had assumed, it led to a narrow corridor, which ended in another door, this one marked ‘TOILET’.

The doctor shrugged.

‘I kept meaning to get a proper extension built, but that one does the job. Look—’

The doorbell sounded for a third time.

‘I really have to get this.’

‘Of course.’

Claire paused for a moment, then walked back across the floor and grabbed the buggy by its handle. Anna was fast asleep but she still didn’t like the thought of leaving her in the doctor’s care, particularly since the woman was not exactly hiding her eagerness to finish work for the day. Her receptionist didn’t work on Thursdays so she’d had to handle all of the morning’s paperwork and appointments on her own.

Sending a silent prayer of thanks to her husband and his insistence on buying a ‘travel system’, with its thousand-euro suspension, Claire wheeled her still sleeping daughter smoothly and silently through the surgery, down the corridor and into the large toilet, taking care to shut both doors gently but firmly behind her. The baby didn’t stir. When Anna slept, she fell almost into unconsciousness. Just like her father, Claire thought, then shut away the image. She didn’t need to think about Matt now. Didn’t need to think about him, or what he wanted, or, indeed, how he’d feel if he’d known what she was discussing with the doctor today. She didn’t have the energy for that right now. She needed to get things straight in her own head first. Then she’d talk to him. Then things would be fine.

She parked the buggy under a folded nappy-changing table, leaned over and stared into the mirror. God! No wonder the doctor had handed her a tissue. It was only a surprise she hadn’t suggested a prescription for Xanax as well. Her roots were two weeks past needing to be done and black mascara was smudged into the spidery lines at the sides of her eyes, lines that hadn’t been there eighteen months ago. It wasn’t fair to blame them solely on her baby, either. Work had been insane this past while. Claire loved being a detective. The job was everything she had always dreamed it would be: challenging, busy, never boring. But, God, it was full-on. And now Matt, who was supposed to be the main parent in the home, had just seen his web-design business take off like a rocket. That was brilliant for him, of course, and the money was handy, but the increase in his workload had brought with it as many complications as advantages. The grannies were being great but they couldn’t be around all the time, and gaps were emerging in their childcare arrangements that kept Claire awake at night while her husband and his identikit child snored on. Ah, she was just weary, that was all. Worn out. She felt like she was working to 99 per cent capacity most of the time and when the extra one per cent was thrown into the mix . . .

Get a grip, woman. Bending over again, Claire turned on the cold tap and splashed water on her face. Cup of coffee, hour to herself, be grand. She stood back from the sink and registered, in the distance, the sound of a door opening and voices coming into the main surgery. Straightening, she raked her fingers through her hair. Hopefully whoever it was wouldn’t stay long and then she could leave, make another appointment with the doctor for a week’s time. She’d have her mind made up by then, surely.

She could do with a glass of water first, though. All that talking – okay, crying – had left her parched. Leaving Anna asleep in the buggy, she walked out of the toilet and back into the corridor that separated it from the surgery. A small drinking fountain had been installed on one wall, and as she bent over it, words filtered to her through the thin dividing door. At first, she tried to ignore them, aware she was impinging on the privacy of someone who was consulting with a doctor. But the police officer in her couldn’t ignore the anger in the woman’s voice as the volume rose.

‘Why do you look so surprised, Heather? Do I scare you, is that it?’

Claire heard fear in the doctor’s voice as she asked, ‘Is that – is that a gun?’

The dull slapping sound of metal hitting flesh provided the answer.

CHAPTER THREE

Eileen, 1985

Eileen watched her dad’s car disappear around the corner, a trail of blue smoke hanging in the air even after the vehicle had vanished from sight. She looked up along the road then, but didn’t move her feet. She’d seen that street a million times from the top of the bus, but had never walked along it before. She was only twenty minutes from her home, but might as well have been a million miles away.

‘They were lovely houses in their day,’ her mother had told her dubiously, when she’d read the address on the party invitation.

‘Huge mansions. You’d have had servants and all living in them, once upon a time.’

But that day must have been a very long time ago. Now the street was neglected, scruffy and unloved. The newsagent on the corner had bars in the window and the wooden sign outside was so tattered you could read only half of the ad for that night’s Evening Press. As Eileen squinted at it, an empty can rattled past her foot, making her jump.

‘It’ll be a flat, I suppose,’ her mother had said finally, handing back the invitation. I wonder do you really have to go . . .’

Eileen knew she had to kill the discussion right there. She wanted to go to the party more than anything else in the world. Even the invitation had been a thing of wonder. Eileen had been to birthday parties before, of course she had, and she’d hosted a few as well, and every one had been exactly the same. Eight or nine girls sitting in a kitchen, wearing cardboard hats from Hector Grey’s and eating homemade Rice Krispie buns. No one her age ever sent out invitations, especially not printed ones. Invitations were for twenty-first birthdays and weddings, not for twelve-year-olds who saw each other every day in school. But that’s exactly what Heather Sterling had handed around the week before, a glossy white card with a picture on the front of a stick figure dancing beside a record player. Inside, elegant black handwriting declared that Heather Sterling was about to turn twelve and that she’d love it if Miss Eileen Delaney could come to her party. Miss Delaney had thought about little else ever since.

The green numbers on her digital watch told her she was running late but, nervous now, Eileen still couldn’t persuade her feet to move. Her friends were getting ready in Mary B’s house. Eileen could picture the scene, could smell it even, Mary B, Trisha and Mary C fighting for space in front of the mirrored wardrobe doors, the air heavy with Impulse and the smell of the gloopy green hair gel Mary C used to scrunch dry her curls. Mary B’s mam was going to give them a lift to the party and collect them afterwards, and there would have been room for Eileen in the car, too, if she’d wanted to go.

But Eileen hadn’t. She and her friends would be heading to secondary school in a few months’ time, and already the Marys were planning that they’d continue to sit together, or at the very least hang around together at lunchtime if they ended up in different classes. Eileen couldn’t help feeling it all sounded, well, a little boring. Predictable. So, for one day at least, she had decided to do something completely different. Except now, as the street in front of her seemed to grow longer, the buildings taller and more imposing, she was regretting that decision.

‘The principal told me I was to come in here?’

When she’d arrived in their class, just over a year ago, the American accent hadn’t been the only thing that had marked Heather Sterling out as different. She didn’t wear a duffle coat, didn’t scribble the names of the bands she liked onto her green cloth schoolbag, didn’t produce Club Milks and cheese sandwiches from a plastic box to eat at lunchtime. In fact, she didn’t seem to eat at all, just spent her free periods sitting on the small wall beside the basketball court, one leg crossed over the other, a black slip-on shoe hanging lazily from her toe. Sometimes she read magazines, NME and Melody Maker, which were nothing like the brightly coloured Smash Hits the two Marys borrowed from Mary B’s older sister and devoured from cover to cover. And she didn’t even go home to the same sort of place as they did. Eileen and her friends all lived in houses that looked like children’s drawings, white boxes with four windows and a door, a strip of grass in front and a family car parked in the gravelled driveway. Heather and her parents lived in what she called an apartment, and Eileen’s mother called a flat, and it all seemed hopelessly exotic and exciting.

Heather’s mother was an anthropologist, she told them. Eileen had made her repeat th. . .