Somebody Knows

by Michelle McDonagh

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Home truths come at a heavy price in the gripping new novel from the bestselling author of There's Something I Have to Tell You

As her adoptive mother lays dying, journalist Cara Joyce overhears a shocking piece of information about her origins. The information connects her to an unsolved death - that of Lucia Casey, a young woman whose body was found buried in a Connemara bog nearly thirty years ago.

To this day, the mystery of Lucia's disappearance and death remains unsolved.

Cara's quest to find out what happened reunites her with the powerful Casey family. But as her obsession with the truth begins to take over her life, she finds herself increasingly at odds with those around her.

Who is behind Lucia's death and what are they hiding? And what will Cara risk in the present to solve the mysteries of the past?

Somebody Knows is a page-turning story of dangerous secrets and the lengths people will go to keep them.

Praise for Michelle McDonagh's debut novel, There's Something I Have to Tell You:

'A gripping whodunnit' Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt

'This perfectly paced slice of rural noir is extremely addictive' The Business Post

'Completely original ... a page-turner' Andrea Carter

'Compelling ... it will keep you guessing til the end' Sheila O'Flanagan

Release date: May 23, 2024

Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland

Print pages: 384

Sample

It all started the day before her mother died. Well, it started long before that, of course, but she had been totally in the dark until then.

The country was basking in a heatwave that broke Irish temperature records. The weather was all anybody could talk about, the national obsession having gone into overdrive. Met Éireann had issued a status yellow high temperature warning and the country was split firmly into two camps: those mopping their brows and exclaiming, ‘I can’t stick this feckin’ heat,’ and those descending en masse on the beaches along the coast.

Cara loved the heat, and God knew they saw little enough of it in this part of the world, but it felt wrong for the sun to be blazing outside when her mother was inside, dying in a darkened room.

She had been glad to get out of her car and into the relative coolness of the hospice after her drive from the far side of the city, stuck in traffic most of the way. The only time Cara had ever set foot in the place before was about seven years ago when she had been sent out to cover the opening of a new extension, never imagining for one moment that her own mother would end up living out the last days of her life there.

It wasn’t as depressing a place as one might imagine, given all the dying that went on within its walls, its ethos being to help people to die well. To deliver them out of this world as peacefully as possible. Like a reverse labour ward, if you thought about it. For her mother, like many of the other patients, cancer had brought her here.

The vast dormer bungalow was sunny and welcoming, its walls hung with paintings by local artists. There was a play room for children and a little chapel where patients and family members could go to say a prayer or weep in private.

Cara wandered down the hall towards her mother’s room, nodding as she passed the wife of a man dying two doors down. Only in his late thirties with two small children, Dad had told her. Life could be so bloody cruel.

Her mother’s name was on her door: Katherine Joyce. Nobody called her Katherine, though. She was Kitty. Their favourite nurse, Mary C, was just coming out of her room.

‘She’s not in great humour today,’ she said. ‘Didn’t have a great night. She’s dozing now.’

‘Thanks, Mary. Is Dad in with her?’

‘I think he’s gone to light a candle, love. He’s not far anyway. Helena was here again ‒ she’s not long gone.’

Aunty Helena, her mother’s younger sister, had been as devastated as they were by the diagnosis.

Cara stuck her head around the door of the room.

Christ.

You’d think she’d be used to it by now, but no. It was so hard to comprehend that her poor mother, who seemed to have spent most of her life on a diet, had somehow shrivelled into this tiny, gaunt figure propped up against her pillows, like a child in the bed.

Cara decided to leave her to sleep and see where her father had got to.

As she turned down the corridor towards the chapel, the sweet smell of melting wax drifted towards her. She heard her father’s voice, low and urgent coming from inside, the door left ajar to allow air in. She was about to enter when she heard a second voice, hushed too. Aunty Helena.

She would never know what made her stop in her tracks at that moment, to step away from the door and linger outside. A feeling that she was intruding on something, perhaps. She hovered outside for a few seconds, debating whether to go in or turn back to her mother’s room. She would curse herself afterwards for not walking away. For moving closer to the door instead.

‘Sure she’s off her head on drugs, Helena. She doesn’t mean it. Not really.’ Her father sounded upset.

‘I know, I know. She worked herself up into a right state, though. Going on about Lucia and wondering did ye do the right thing. Whether ye should have told her.’

‘God Almighty. I hope she doesn’t say anything like that in front of Cara.’

‘That’s why I wanted to say it to you, Billy. To warn you, just in case.’

Cara backed away from the door, and went up the corridor.

Who was Lucia?

And what did her mother think they should have told whom?

Paul was sitting at her mother’s bedside when she got back to the room.

‘How’ya? I just went home for a shower and a change of clothes,’ he said, a false brightness in his tone. ‘Everything OK?’

‘Grand, yeah.’ As grand as she could be when her mother was hours away from death. Two days at most, according to Dr Jennings, the palliative-care consultant. ‘I just needed a bit of fresh air. She was asleep a few minutes ago when I looked in.’

‘Where’s the aul’ man?’ Her brother looked behind her. ‘Ah, speak of an ass. How’ya, Dad? Lighting more candles? You’ll be broke.’

Her father gave a pinched smile. Their mother had been a lifelong believer in the power of a lit candle and a prayer to good old St Jude. The shock of being given only months to live had knocked her mother’s faith, though, a cause too hopeless even for the patron saint of lost causes. So her father, who used to roll his eyes at his wife’s perpetual candle-lighting, had taken over and was now the one imploring St Jude, and anybody else who might be listening, to intercede on her behalf. Not to cure her, that would have taken nothing short of a miracle, but to give her as good a death as possible under the circumstances.

He looked drained. The weeks of driving back and forth through traffic from the far side of town to watch the woman he had spent the best part of his life with waste away in front of him were taking their toll.

‘Why don’t you go out for some fresh air, Dad? Take a break for a while. Or go home and have a shower. I’ll stay with Mum,’ Paul said.

‘No, I’m fine. I went out earlier while Helena sat with her. She’s just after heading off there. I’m happier staying here.’

He didn’t have to spell it out. Mum didn’t have long left and he didn’t want to miss a single precious second. He was trying to hold it together for her mother, for all of them, but his eyes betrayed him. Dulled by the pain of nursing his wife of over 50 years through terminal cancer. Only five months since her secondary diagnosis, the dire prognosis, so little time to get their heads around it before she got sick.

Maisie had been only a few months old when her granny Kitty had initially been diagnosed. Ironically, Cara had been waiting for the right time to tell them she had decided to search for her birth-mother, but that had been pushed into the background by her mother’s illness. Breast cancer. The surgery and chemo had been a success and she was put on Tamoxifen to prevent a recurrence of her disease. The oncologist had outlined the risks involved, the increased risk of endometrial cancer, but recommended that she take it.

They had no way of knowing whether the drug had caused the secondary tumours in Kitty’s womb two and a half years after her primary diagnosis or if that would have happened anyway. What they were told, though, was that it was an aggressive cancer of the womb lining, and that even after an emergency hysterectomy, she had only months to live. Too late for treatment.

Cara would never forget the shock of that news, herself, her father and Paul sitting in the consultant’s office staring blankly at him. He had been wearing a navy polka dot tie and the spots had begun to jump around in front of her eyes.

Her mother had still looked perfectly healthy, her only complaints a bloated belly and some slight spotting that she hadn’t mentioned to anyone. She had never smoked, and two half-pints of Guinness was a bender for her. Cancer was a lottery, though. You could have every risk factor on the list and swerve it or not a single one and succumb to it after a short battle.

She had harboured a secret hope that her mother would be one of those miracle stories you heard of, one of those people given six months to live and still walking around hale and hearty twenty years later. Sadly it wasn’t to be.

The symptoms had hit her thick and fast. Nausea, exhaustion and pain. As if the disease had been waiting for the diagnosis to be confirmed before it attacked in full force, running rampant through her body. The weight slid from her bones as if she had undergone some drastic form of liposuction. In just a few months, she went from a healthy-ish seventy-four-year-old carrying an excess stone or so to the skeletal figure in the bed before them who looked years older. The worst part was watching her try to hide her suffering as the tumours grew and spread, pressing on the nerves in her abdomen.

Despite her pain, her mum always managed to muster up a big smile for Cara, still the same, just set now in a different face.

Until today. There was no smile for her today. Instead, her mother’s eyes, clouded by sickness and opioids, welled up as Cara moved towards her bed. She hadn’t slept for long.

‘Hi, Mum.’ She bent down and brushed a light kiss off her frail forehead.

To her dismay, her mother’s eyes overflowed. Cara’s nose tingled, her own tears threatening. She swallowed hard.

‘It’s OK, Mum, you’re OK,’ she soothed, wiping the warm tears from her mother’s cheeks with her thumbs. As she would for Maisie. Of course Mum wasn’t OK. She never would be again.

Fucking cancer!

But what else could she say?

It’s shite, Mum, absolutely shite, and we’re all in bits, trying to hold it together in front of you.

Her mother let out an agonised moan and thrashed beneath her covers, trying to kick them off, to get out of the bed, but she was thwarted in her efforts by the safety rails on either side.

She grabbed Cara’s hand, her grip still surprisingly strong.

‘Stop now, Kitty love, you’ll hurt yourself.’ Her father put a gentle hand on her mother’s shoulder.

‘The baby! Where is she?’ Her mother tightened her grip on Cara’s hand, pinching her skin. ‘Help me, Billy. Oh, God Almighty, she’s going to take her.’

She was thrashing harder now, banging against the railing. Her eyes were wide with fear.

‘Relax, Mum. It’s just Cara.’ Paul stood beside her father on the far side of the bed. ‘Maybe we should give one of the nurses a shout,’ he murmured. ‘Where’s the bell yoke?’

Jesus, this was horrific. Every time they thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did. Seeing her mother so agitated, so frightened, was even worse than seeing her in physical pain. It was so fucking unfair. She didn’t deserve any of this.

As Cara rooted around under the bed covers looking for the call bell, her mother shot straight up in the bed, as if she had been electrocuted, and leaned over the safety rail towards her, still clinging to her hand.

Oh God! She was going to fall out if she leaned any further.

‘No, NOOO, stop her, she’s trying to take the child. Oh, Lord, help us, please. Somebody do something …’

Cara’s fingers finally made contact with the bell, but her mother’s wailing had already summoned Mary to the room.

‘Now Kitty, my love, what’s all the commotion about, hmm? You’re making an awful racket altogether.’

The nurse plumped up the pillows behind her, and guided her gently against them. Cara envied her calm, comforting composure. It was as if not even an earthquake would rock her. Her mother dropped Cara’s hand, and grabbed for Mary instead. Then she let out another distressed moan, more of a whimper now, and her hand fell heavily onto the covers as if somebody had unplugged her.

She continued to mutter strings of gibberish that made no sense, as Mary tidied the covers around her, tucking her in neatly.

‘You’re alright, Kitty my love. I’ll give you something to help relax you a bit now, OK?’

Cara had to leave the room, to get away from her poor mother, who was still moaning quietly and plucking at the bed covers with her skinny fingers. She stood outside in the corridor wanting to run as far away from this hell as she could but not wanting to leave her mother at the same time. Terrified that Mum would die if she left, of not being with her at the end. She wanted the nightmare to be over, but the only way it could happen was for her mother’s life to be over, and she couldn’t face that either.

Her bowel contorted in a painful spasm. The stress of her mother’s illness was playing havoc with her IBS, causing the nerves along the wall of her gastrointestinal tract to become hyper-sensitised to normal gut movements. Like a smoke alarm shrieking furiously when there was no fire.

It was torture having to watch her mum, who had been good and kind her whole life, end it this way. Cara had never been in any doubt that her parents had adored her, had never felt any less loved than Paul. More, if anything ‒ she had been so spoiled by them all.

And there was surely never a prouder grandmother than Kitty Joyce. Parading Maisie down the Prom, like a chubby little empress, in her pram, stopping every two minutes to talk to somebody she knew, any opportunity to show off her grandchild. How could it be fair that she was spending the last days of her life like this?

She felt a hand touch her shoulder. Mary C.

‘She’s grand now, love. She’ll sleep for a while. Why don’t you go and sit somewhere quiet for a bit?’

She didn’t know how Mary and her colleagues did this job day in, day out, managing to keep so positive and upbeat in front of the patients and their families.

‘I’m fine, Mary. I’ll go back in a minute.’

Her father emerged from the room, Paul close on his heels. Paul had been eighteen when Kitty and Billy adopted Cara, but despite the age difference they had always been close. The four of them had. Things would never be the same again after her mother, the heart of the family, was gone.

Paul looked shook. He had stayed there last night with her father and was insisting on staying again tonight with Cara. She had tried to talk him into going home and getting a proper night’s sleep, but he wouldn’t entertain the idea. He, too, would never forgive himself if he wasn’t there when his mother took her last breath.

‘She’s settled again now, thank God,’ her father said.

‘Why was she so upset? What was she on about? A baby being taken? Do you think she was talking about Maisie?’

Cara had been plagued with dreams of harming or losing her baby in the first year after her birth. Of going to take the baby seat out of the car only to find it empty. Or looking into the pram to see a stranger’s child looking up at her. Of dropping her on her head so that it smashed into smithereens, like a piece of fine bone china. She knew they were pure anxiety dreams, that she wasn’t the first new mother to have them, but that didn’t make it any easier when she woke at night, heart pounding, unable to get back to sleep until she had checked that her baby was still breathing.

‘That’s only the medication talking, love. It’s no wonder her poor brain is mithered, the amount of stuff she’s on.’

‘Dad’s right, Car. It’s probably the morphine,’ Paul said. ‘Making her see things that aren’t there.’

There was every possibility they were right, of course. That the opioids were causing her mother to act so strangely. Or perhaps it was a sign that the disease had spread to her brain. Still, Cara was left feeling distinctly unsettled by the whole thing.

And rightly so as it turned out.

The conversation she had overheard between her father and Helena had been flickering in the back of her mind, but she had been too caught up in the flurry of the funeral arrangements to give it attention. The church in Salthill was packed, the crowd spilling outside as neighbours, friends, her father’s former pupils and their parents – some of whom were also former pupils – turned out in their droves to pay their respects.

It was a cruel day for a burial. A band of low pressure had pushed in, bringing with it thunderstorms and heavy showers. As they stood at Kitty’s graveside in Rahoon, biblical sheets of rain bucketed from the heavens, drowning the mourners, and causing flash floods around the country. As she watched her mother’s coffin swallowed by the earth, Cara had felt the soggy ground swaying beneath her feet, as if she were standing on a pontoon, her mother drifting away from her out to sea in a row boat with no oars.

The days after the funeral were a blur. She functioned on auto-pilot, dropping and collecting Maisie to and from crèche, trying to work from home, mentally and physically drained after the last weeks and days of her mother’s illness.

Kian had gone back to work the day after the funeral, a Saturday. He had fought hard for the contract he was currently working on, a new school build in Oranmore, and couldn’t afford to take any more time off. Sometimes she wondered if the decision for him to go out on his own had been right for their family. He had always wanted to work for himself, and drove his Connolly Electrical van with pride. There were benefits, not least the autonomy it gave him, but being the boss also brought plenty of headaches. Getting the school contract had been a major coup, but she hoped Kian hadn’t bitten off more than he could chew. He had a great reputation as an electrician but, these days, he spent most of his time managing the lads on the job as well as the budget, areas in which he had no experience.

She was due back to work tomorrow. It was probably for the best, although it felt all wrong for the world to be turning as normal without her mother in it. For her to be mindlessly pushing a trolley around Dunnes now while everybody else went about their daily business around her.

At least she had work to distract her. As did Paul. She didn’t know how her dad would cope, though. Her parents had lived in each other’s pockets although her father at least had maintained a bit of independence. He had worried about being bored after he retired as principal of Scoil Bhríde, the boys’ national school within walking distance of their home in Bayview Crescent, but he had thrived. Seven mornings a week, he pounded the pavements of the Prom before adjourning to Ground & Co. beside the aquarium to meet some friend or other for coffee and a chat. That had all changed with her mother’s diagnosis, of course.

Kitty had always been happiest at home, fluttering around her little nest with no real interest in hobbies or a social life outside her family. She was close to Helena, the pair of them very different from their other sister, the glamorous Maryanne, who had never looked back after she left her first husband. She had enjoyed a succession of suitors before she eventually settled down with her second husband in their swanky mansion on Taylor’s Hill. Maryanne was always on the go between tennis, swimming, power-walking the Prom and meeting friends for lunch. It was hard to believe the three women were sisters. Helena had married a Claddagh lad and moved into the house where he lived with his widowed father, only a stone’s throw from where they’d grown up on Grattan Road.

Cara couldn’t face sitting in the empty house for the afternoon. She hadn’t wanted to drop Maisie to crèche that morning, had wanted to keep her at home, but she knew Kian was right. It had taken her so long to settle there that they would be making it harder for her by not sending her in. She would never forget those first days and weeks after her maternity leave had ended and she had gone back to work. Her baby’s confused eyes had tracked her as she walked away, abandoning her in that strange place for hours.

She had left her for one hour the first day and gradually increased it but Maisie had quickly cottoned on to what was happening and begun to cling to her and whimper as soon as they approached the door of Little Tots.

It didn’t matter how many people told her it was good for Maisie to socialise with other children, Cara had known that all her baby wanted was to be with her. And all Cara had wanted was to be with Maisie during those guilt-filled early days back at work. For the first year or two, she hadn’t been able to tell where she ended and Maisie started, as if they had remained physically connected even after her birth. Joined by an invisible umbilical cord. She was aware this probably wasn’t normal. Or healthy.

Things had definitely become easier. Maisie had eventually settled. She was three now and seemed happy enough going into crèche most days, but Cara still felt torn.

It wasn’t until she had held her baby in her arms for the first time that it had hit her. The shocking recognition that this perfect miniature being was the first blood relative she had ever met.

The midwife had laid her slimy naked daughter on her chest, their hearts beating together for the first time outside her body. She had cradled her baby’s fragile skull in her hand, felt the blood pulse through the soft spot on top where the bones had not yet come together. Those soft spots of which there were two, she had learned, one at the front and one at the back, made it possible for the bony plates of the skull to compress and overlap as the head passed through the narrow birth canal. One of many clever design features.

She had expected to feel love for her child, of course, had felt the bond between them strengthen as her baby developed from the size of a poppy seed into a fully formed being inside her, but the sheer ferocity of that love had taken her by surprise. It was a feeling she had never experienced before, not even for Kian. Powerful enough to bust through a wall, to lift a bus, to die for.

She had leaned down and inhaled the sweet cheesiness of her newborn, who was rooting and snuffling into her chest, oblivious to Kian lea. . .