There's Something I Have to Tell You

by Michelle McDonagh

Genres: Thrillers; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

Long-buried family secrets fight their way to the surface in this compelling mystery.

HOME IS WHERE THE SECRETS ARE BURIED

On Glenbeg Farm, it was a morning like any other. Only the distressed bark of beloved collie Samson hinted that all was not well . . .

When the bodies of wealthy matriarch Ursula Kennedy and her farmer husband Jimmy are pulled from the slurry pit, shock ricochets throughout the family and community. Everyone has questions, including the gardaí. Was this a tragic accident? Or is there more to it than meets the eye?

Their son Rob, once destined for a high-flying legal career, is now involved in the family business. He seems distraught about his parents' deaths, but rumours soon spread about a blazing row he had with his mother before she died.

Rob's wife Kate had a difficult relationship with Ursula. Life will certainly be easier now, without her every move being controlled by her imperious mother-in-law.

Meanwhile, Christina, the victims' fragile daughter, is carrying a private pain she's never been able to speak about.

As vivid memories rush back of another tragic death on the farm some sixteen years ago, a toxic secret is set to come to the surface, one that has been simmering for decades . . .

(P) 2023 Hachette Ireland

Release date: April 13, 2023

Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland

Print pages: 336

Sample

Kate

Kate ignored her phone the first time it rang. The café had been mental for lunch today, a blessing in disguise, as it kept her distracted. They were short-staffed as usual in The Creamery and she was helping to clear tables.

When her phone rang again straight away, she took a deep breath and answered it. ‘Hi, love—’

‘Kate … it’s my father! I think he’s in the pit the dog was barking his phone is on the side with his cap Jesus Christ his dinner’s sitting on the counter … I can’t find him anywhere!’

‘Slow down, Rob, I can’t understand you.’ Her heart was beating like a bodhrán. She could feel the heat rising up her neck, flushing her face as if somebody had just turned her thermostat up full blast.

‘GET MOTHER, YOU NEED TO GET MOTHER!’

‘OK, just calm down a minute, love. Where are—?’

‘Jesus Christ, Kate, will you just get Mother? Please, just get her!’

She could hear the dog whimpering in the background, as if he was in pain. Then she realised that it wasn’t the dog at all, it was her husband. Her gut clenched like a fist ready to punch. Rob was the solid, unflappable one in their relationship, the low-strung antidote to her chronic catastrophising. He wasn’t given to histrionics.

‘OK, love, I’m going to get her now. Where are you exactly?’

‘Oh God, oh God, oh Jesus! I can’t find him anywhere, the dog was barking like a lunatic outside the shed, the agitator was on and the door was closed—’

‘The agitator? What’s the agitator doing on?’ Although a born-and-bred city girl herself, Kate had been living on the farm, just outside the east Galway market town of Glenbeg, long enough to know that slurry spreading was banned at this time of year. It was an EU directive. Something to do with protecting drinking water.

I don’t know what the hell he was at but I can’t find him anywhere …’ Rob’s voice quavered, pitched too high. ‘The slats have been lifted inside … I think he might be in there, Kate …’

‘You’re not in the shed now, are you?’

Kate was all too aware of the dangers of the slurry pit, particularly in the first half an hour after mixing started, when the gases were at their most lethal. Jimmy was a stickler about it since his grandkids had come along; it had been very different in his own children’s day. Every now and then, there was another news story about another tragic slurry-pit accident. And every time Kate had the same thought: What an awful way to go. Her own kids were banned from going anywhere near the sheds that housed the farm’s two pits.

When Rob had brought her on a tour of the eighty-hectare Kennedy farm during her first visit, about three months into their relationship, she had been astounded at the size of the underground tanks. There were two slatted sheds, one for the dairy herd closer to the farmhouse and one further back for the beef cattle. The tanks – each about twelve feet wide – ran underground the full length of the galvanised cattle sheds either side of a central feeding passage. That day had been the first and, sadly, one of only a handful of times she had met Rob’s older brother, Mark, who had chuckled when she squidged her nose at the ripe stench of decomposing cow shit and explained that the cows ‘piss and crap where they stand’ down through the slats in the floor into the pit below. Poor Mark. As if this family hadn’t been through enough already.

‘No, I’m outside,’ Rob said. ‘I turned the agitator off. And I called 999. There’s an ambulance on the way, but if he’s in there …’

He didn’t need to spell it out. If her father-in-law was in that tank, it was far too late for an ambulance.

She couldn’t believe it was happening.

Kate took the stairs to Ursula’s office on the first floor of the main farm-park building two at a time and barged in without knocking, something she would never normally have done. Her mother-in-law was not at her desk. Her computer screen was black and there was no sign of her bag or coat.

She tried calling Ursula’s number from her own phone as she ran back through the café, asking as she went if anybody had seen her around. There was no answer from her phone and nobody could recall seeing her that day at all. She hadn’t appeared in the restaurant for lunch earlier, but there was nothing too unusual in that. People would assume that Ursula was on another one of her health kicks, had knocked back a wheatgrass shot or a green protein power smoothie at her desk. The elegant blonde, who looked at least a decade younger than her sixty-four years, certainly didn’t fit the stereotype of the typical farmer’s wife; she did own a pair of wellies, but they were spotless Hunters that rarely ever set foot in the farmyard.

Kate stopped briefly to let Nellie, her right-hand woman in the café, who was on the till, know what was going on.

‘Have you seen Ursula around, Nellie?’

‘No, love, not today. Is everything all right?’

‘Rob just rang me in an awful state. He can’t find Jimmy anywhere but somebody’s been mixing slurry down the back shed and he thinks he might have fallen in …’

‘Lord God Almighty. I’ll ring Brendan straight away and get him over. Jimmy told him not to come in today, he said he’d manage away without him.’ Nellie had been part of the Kennedy family even longer than Kate, since Rob and his siblings were children. Her husband, Brendan, worked with Jimmy and Rob as a part-time farmhand. She wiped her skinny hands on her apron now and called one of the girls to take over from her.

‘I’ll run out and check the farmers’ market,’ Nellie said, heading in the direction of the car park where local food producers plied their wares every Tuesday and Saturday. Ursula was a big fan of the spinach hummus and stuffed olives from the Popeye and Olive stall.

‘Thanks, Nellie. Tell her to ring Rob straight away if you find her,’ Kate said.

Then she hared over to the farmhouse where her in-laws lived, making the two-minute walk in less than one.

As she stepped into Ursula’s kitchen she heard her mother-in-law’s phone ringing. The distinctive old-style telephone brinng brinng. The gold iPhone, a recent upgrade, vibrated frantically on the sleek walnut table, beside Ursula’s mushroom leather handbag.

Kate’s hands shook as she clumsily swiped the screen.

‘Mother … it’s Daddy …’

‘Rob, love,’ she cut in quickly. ‘It’s me. Her phone was on the kitchen table. I can’t find her anywhere.’

Kate

It felt as if she had fallen asleep watching the six o’clock news and woken up on the wrong side of the screen. Or in a Netflix true-crime documentary. CRIME SCENE NO ENTRY, the blue and white garda tape repeated over and over along the cordon that encircled the cattle shed. The thin plastic tape as effective as a reinforced steel barrier in keeping out all but those working the scene.

A young garda, fresh from the oven at Templemore and tightly packed into a fluorescent yellow jacket, manned the entrance to the cordon, painstakingly entering the particulars of everybody who went in and out of the shed in his regulation beige notebook. The door at the front of the shed was wide open now, but Rob told her it had been closed down when he had got there earlier, the poor dog almost collapsing in relief when he saw him. Thank God, thought Kate, the children had been collected from school as usual by their childminder, Jenny, and brought to her house, so they wouldn’t be arriving home to this spectacle.

A desultory dusk had fallen and it was spitting down drizzle, the stealthy kind that soaks through clothes without even seeming that wet. The yard was lit up by powerful floodlights which beamed onto a large metal poster screwed to the side of the galvanised shed, highlighting a black and white skull and crossbones. Always obey safe agitation guidelines, the sign cautioned. ONE LUNGFUL OF SLURRY CAN KILL.

The place was crawling with emergency personnel, scurrying in and out between their vehicles and the large shed, immersed in their various roles. A red and yellow fire engine was parked parallel to the open door, blocking sight of what was happening inside. A plump hose snaked its way from the Scania truck inside the building, into which fire fighters in fluorescent gear, wearing breathing apparatus, had disappeared.

There were three squad cars parked in the yard, as well as an unmarked garda car and a white crime scene investigation unit van a few feet away from where Kate and Rob stood just outside the cordon under a striped golf umbrella, with Jimmy’s brother Kieran, his brother-in-law Jarlath and Nellie’s husband, Brendan. There was also a neon yellow HSE ambulance, a familiar sight and sound on the road heading for Our Lady’s Hospital on the edge of town, lights flashing, sirens wailing and yelping. Kate automatically blessed herself every time she passed one and prayed there was nobody belonging to anyone she knew in the back of it.

She kept her mother’s old brown scapulars in her glove box, tangled up amid the accumulated crap that had been stuffed in there. It wasn’t as if the two small pieces of woven cloth joined by string, an outward sign of her mother’s devotion to Our Lady, had done the woman much good, but the little tattered pile somehow made Kate feel safer on the road.

She felt an inappropriate urge to burst out laughing bubble up inside her now as they stood watching the crime scene investigators gearing up. The same urge that came over her at funerals. As the team pulled their prospecting paraphernalia from the vehicle, Kate was reminded of Mr Fox’s van from Peppa Pig. Lily had lived and breathed that bloody pink pig for about five years. There was nothing that Freddy Fox’s dad didn’t have in the back of his little blue van: grandfather clocks, bicycle bells, a live chicken, even a cement mixer. She half expected him to pull out a dildo some day or a box of gimp suits. The garda CSIU van was a bit the same, only it was boiler suits and masks and booties and goggles and tape measures and rulers and swabs and cameras and God only knew what else.

Rob stood silently beside her, watching the investigators – two men and one woman – zip their white boiler suits up the middle. They looked like giant toddlers zipped into flimsy plastic sleep suits. Two suits each, double bagged. They pulled thick industrial booties over their wellies, securing them with tape around their knees. Hoods up, goggles on, masks fastened around their heads. Six pairs of blue latex gloves snapped on to three pairs of hands. All that was visible when they were finished were three pairs of eyes topped with foreheads. As if there had been an Ebola outbreak on the farm.

Rob had finally stopped clutching at straws as to his mother’s possible whereabouts. The entire Glenbeg Farm Park property and grounds and the adjacent working farm had been searched to no avail. She wasn’t in her own house, nor, unsurprisingly, was she in Kate and Rob’s cottage at the far side of the yard. There was no sign of her in the main building that housed the café and offices, or the new barn conversion at the edge of the property. At Rob’s insistence, Kate went through the farce of ringing Halo, the hair salon on Main Street where Ursula went for the twice-weekly blow-dries that kept her blonde bob so sleek, even though it was inconceivable that she would have left her handbag, phone and jeep at home.

They had given the gardaí the numbers of Ursula’s friends in case somebody had collected her and maybe taken her off somewhere, out of the norm. Nobody had seen or heard from her all day. Then Rob had another brainwave: maybe she had a doctor’s appointment. His mother was a private woman; she might have kept this to herself. A call to the surgery put paid to that notion.

‘It just doesn’t make any sense, none of this makes any sense.’ Rob kept saying the same thing over and over, trying in vain to knit some sense from the ball of knotted yarn in his brain. His lovely brown eyes were filled with confusion.

‘He must have got mixed up, love. Maybe he was worse than we thought – he could have been hiding it from us,’ Kate said.

‘No matter how confused he was, he would never have gone agitating at this time of year. And to leave it wide open like that? I can’t get my head around any of this.’

‘I know, love, I know. Maybe he had another mini-stroke without anybody knowing and that affected his thinking.’

When Ursula had finally managed to drag Jimmy in for tests eight months ago because of his memory issues, a scan of his brain showed that he had suffered a mini-stroke at some point in the previous year. A couple of weeks later, he had received the devastating blow of a diagnosis of vascular dementia.

‘But what about Mother? Why the hell would she come down here? There’s no way she’d have gone near that tank while the agitating was going on, not a snowball’s chance in hell. Unless Daddy got into trouble and she heard him calling …’

There was nothing Kate could say. Guilt curdled into bile in her stomach and rose up her throat. She swallowed it back down, wincing at the bitter taste. The sour, vomity stench of the slurry that hung in the air wasn’t helping either.

She laid her head against her husband’s chest, wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders and held him tight to her, watching the surreal scene unfold before them. Despite being above average height for an Irish woman, she always felt petite beside her tall, broad-backed husband.

The rain was coming down heavier now, tap-tapping off the roof of the galvanised shed and dripping off the edge of the umbrella, filling the air with its earthy scent, and the sky had darkened to a dirty grey. A plaintive chorus of mooing came from the shed where the dairy herd were housed for the winter. As if they sensed the tension in the air.

A memory played in Kate’s mind. Of Jimmy answering one of Lily’s endless random questions in that gentle, patient way of his. Too gentle and too patient, it had been his downfall.

‘How can you tell if one of your cows is sad, Grandad?’

‘Oh, they’re well able to let you know if they’re not happy, Lily peteen. They start mooing like mad, a high-pitched kind of a sound, and they might tuck their tail between their legs. They could give you a kick or a butt too if they’re really vexed with you.’

Kate couldn’t fathom that she was never going to see her father-in-law again. She swallowed the thought back down. She couldn’t allow herself to go there, not now. She had to stay strong. For Rob and the kids. And Christina, who was fragile at the best of times.

A uniformed garda with rosacea-stained cheeks and a head of unnaturally black hair ducked under the plastic cordon and made his way over to them. Des Tuohy, a detective sergeant from Glenbeg station, who was some class of a cousin of Rob’s a few times removed.

Kate felt her husband tense beside her.

‘Look, lads, given the situation inside,’ the guard nodded back towards the shed, ‘and the fact there’s still no sign of either of them, we have to assume there’s a strong possibility they could be in the tank. So we need to get it drained asap. I’ve been onto Josie Clarke and he’s on the way now with the tanker.’

Josie Clarke was a local contractor the Kennedys regularly hired to pump slurry from the pits.

‘Jesus, Des, you can’t just leave them in the tank. Can you not send somebody down to check …?’

The sergeant shook his head.

‘I’m sorry, Rob. I know this is desperately upsetting for you and the family but we can’t go near that tank ourselves. It’s a health and safety issue. The slurry will have to be pumped out first. If we do find either, or both, of your parents in there, the lads from the fire brigade will have to get them out.’

‘What’s the story with the cordon, Snitcheen, and all the lads in the white suits?’ Jimmy’s brother Kieran asked, nodding his head towards the crime-scene tape. Des Tuohy had never managed to shake off the nickname he had earned in school due to his proclivity for tattling on his fellow pupils.

‘It’s standard procedure in this type of situation,’ the sergeant assured him before turning to Rob. ‘I was wondering do you have CCTV here? I’m assuming you probably do with all the break-ins around the place lately.’

‘Jesus, the CCTV. I never even thought about that with everything … We have, of course. I only put a new system in last summer after Johnny Buckley’s place was done. I have the app here on my phone. My father’s always giving out about it, says it’s far too complicated, but it’s actually very simple. Hang on there a minute while I get it up.’

As Rob typed in his code to bring up the app, Kate just managed to stop herself from hurling the meagre contents of her stomach all over her boots.

Kate

Rob had barely said two words aloud since he logged into the FarmSecure app and discovered that the farm’s CCTV had been turned off. Around midnight last night. The last footage was of his father leaving the farmhouse shortly before midnight and walking towards the main open-farm building, where he disappeared into an area not covered by the cameras, before the screen went blank.

Rob looked utterly confused. Kate knew him so well though, she could imagine clearly what he was thinking.

Where the hell was he going at that time of night?

Why was the CCTV turned off?

Who turned it off?

Why was he mixing at this time of year?

What the fuck is going on here?

She had sensed the mood in the yard change at that point. Had watched the expression on the sergeant’s face change as Rob informed him that the CCTV wasn’t going to be any help to them. That somebody, for some unknown reason, had turned it off. Which was strange, as Jimmy was a complete technophobe who left ‘all that side of things’ up to his son. Rob had downloaded the app onto his father’s phone but Jimmy never used it, preferring to view the monitor on the wall inside the back door of the farmhouse to see the video footage being transmitted from the cameras located around the yard.

The sergeant walked back to one of the unmarked cars where he spoke urgently to one of his plain-clothed colleagues, who glanced over at the huddle of Kennedy family members standing outside the cordon. He nodded his head and lifted his radio handset to his mouth. Less than fifteen minutes later, another unmarked car pulled into the yard, and a big bald man unfolded himself from the front passenger seat.

‘That’s the super,’ Kieran said. ‘Mick Power. They’ve called in the big guns now.’

The large man conferred briefly with his subordinates before approaching Rob and Kate and introducing himself.

‘We’re going to need to take witness statements from you both,’ he told them, ‘as well as your sister, who I believe lives in the house with your parents.’

‘We’ve already told Des and the lads everything we know, superintendent,’ Rob explained.

‘I’m aware of that, Robert, but we’ll still need to take statements. It’s—’

‘Don’t tell me: standard procedure. My parents are probably lying inside in that tank while you’re out here fluthering around with bloody statements!’

‘I can assure you, Robert, that if we thought for a second there was a chance there was anybody alive in that tank, we’d have a search and rescue operation underway, but that’s not the situation here. As you’re well aware yourself, we’re dealing with a hazardous scene. There’s no way we can send anybody down into that pit until the slurry has been pumped out of it.’

Kate caught Rob’s hand, squeezed it. Tried to communicate some bit of comfort to him. Her husband rarely raised his voice in anger. To raise it to a senior garda was a sign of the intensity of his distress.

The super made all the right sounds. He understood how upset they must be, didn’t want to add to their trauma. But they would have to give those witness statements.

The superintendent left after less than an hour – back to the heated comfort of his office, probably, or maybe home for his tea. Before he went, he introduced them to the man he was leaving in charge: Detective Inspector Noel McGuire. Built like a pencil, apart from the prominent bridge on his nose, the detective inspector sported a pair of bushy eyebrows a schnauzer would have been proud of. A man of few words, after a cursory hello and formal handshake, the detective got straight to work, taking Rob to one side and making him go through everything he had already told both the first garda on the scene and Snitcheen Tuohy.

Kate could feel the frustration vibrating off her husband when he returned.

‘How many more times are they going to make me repeat myself, for Christ’s sake? It’s like being in feckin’ A&E, being asked the same questions over and over by loads of different people.’

‘I know, love, it’s very frustrating,’ she agreed.

Rob made a sudden grab for her arm. ‘Where’s the dog?’

‘He’s in the house, asleep in front of the range. He’s worn out, poor thing.’

‘Jesus, Mother will have a conniption—’ He stopped short.

Samson slept in a kennel outside the farmhouse where Ursula and Jimmy lived. It had been a source of immense frustration to Ursula that she was the only one who called the house by its proper name, Hazeldene, while everybody else insisted on referring to it as ‘the farmhouse’, after she had knocked the original house where her husband’s grandparents had lived and had a replica of a regal Georgian mansion erected in its place when she first moved to Glenbeg as a new bride. The cramped cottage across the yard, where Jimmy had been reared and where Kate and Rob now lived with the kids, was a hole in comparison.

Ursula didn’t do indoor pets, especially scruffy aul’ collies with a dash of Jack Russell and God only knew what else thrown in for luck. Apart from her beloved Cleo, of course – a stunning Siamese who stared disdainfully at the humans she was forced to share her living space with. Grey of body, her limbs and face looked as if they had been dipped in black paint, two stunning blue buttons stitched in for eyes. Her beauty fur deep; Kate couldn’t stand that cat. Still, if it wasn’t for her …

‘He was in an awful state earlier, poor aul’ Sam. He must have been barking for hours,’ Rob said, breaking into her thoughts.

It was so typical of Rob, worrying about the dog when it was looking increasingly likely that he was after losing not just one but both of his parents.

Jenny had popped into the cottage to collect the overnight bag that Kate had packed for the kids: pyjamas, a change of clothes, the new Beanie Boo Santa had brought Lily, a book each for bedtime and their iPads. Oblivious to the fate of their grandparents and the drama unfolding in the farmyard, Lily and Luke had been delighted at this unexpected change to the mundane mid-week routine.

‘I’ll go in to see how Sammy’s doing, get us both a cup of tea to heat us up a bit,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll check on Christina again while I’m in there.’

They had been standing outside for hours and she was frozen to the marrow. A cloud of frizz had risen like mist from her thick blonde hair.

The French doors to the farmhouse kitchen stood wide open, despite the miserable evening, releasing most of the heat the four-oven Aga was busy pumping out. The pungent sweetness of burning turf drifted out to greet her. Inside, mucky wellie prints tracked across Ursula’s precious Italian porcelain tiles. The dog was curled up on the rug in front of the range, out for the count. The cat, whose emerald velvet throne – chosen by Ursula and her interior designer to tie in with the colour theme of the kitchen – had been moved from its usual spot to make room for Samson, was shooting death stares at her sleeping usurper. She switched her vituperative gaze to Kate when she stepped into the room, tracking her movement across the kitchen.

Nellie was manning the teapot.

She took Kate’s icy hands in hers and tried to rub some warmth into them.

‘Kate, loveen, you’re half-perished. There’s hot tea in the pot, and I lit the range when I came over in case ye were in and out.’ Nellie was just the kind of person you wanted around in a crisis. Practical, unflappable and innately maternal despite never having been blessed with children of her own.

‘Will Rob not come in for a while to heat up a bit? He’ll end up with pneumonia.’

‘He won’t, Nellie. Josie Clarke is on his way over with the tanker to drain the pit.’

‘Lord help us and save us,’ Nellie muttered, blessing herself discreetly while she poured tea into two of Ursula’s Denby mugs. The spaghetti junction of skinny blue veins that traversed Nellie’s thin, work-worn hands complemented the distinctively veined Statuario marble countertop that ran the length of the solid-wood cabinetry.

‘I’d say you should fire a drop of somethin’ stronger into that for himself.’ Having taken his own advice, Brendan, Nellie’s husband, sat nursing a steaming glass of whiskey at Ursula’s hand-crafted kitchen island. The smooth curve of the walnut breakfast bar had buried itself deep in the doughy layers of visceral fat he wore around his abdomen like a lagging jacket. Here so was the source of the dirty footprints. Ursula would have had a fit if she caught him in his filthy work clothes plonked up on top of her good velvet bar stool. She had spent a small fortune. . .