The Quiet Truth: a haunting domestic drama full of suspense Read online

  The Quiet Truth

  Sharon Thompson

  Copyright © 2020 Sharon Thompson

  The right of Sharon Thompson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2020 by Bloodhound Books.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-913942-14-4

  Contents

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  Also by Sharon Thompson

  1. Charlie Quinn

  2. Charlie Quinn

  3. Rhonda Irwin

  4. Charlie Quinn

  5. Charlie Quinn

  6. Rhonda Quinn

  7. Charlie Quinn

  8. Charlie Quinn

  9. Charlie Quinn

  10. Rhonda Irwin

  11. Charlie Quinn

  12. Charlie Quinn

  13. Rhonda Irwin

  14. Charlie Quinn

  15. Charlie Quinn

  16. Charlie Quinn

  17. Charlie Quinn

  18. Rhona Irwin

  19. Charlie Quinn

  20. Charlie Quinn

  21. Charlie Quinn

  22. Rhonda Irwin

  23. Charlie Quinn

  24. Charlie Quinn

  25. Charlie Quinn

  26. Charlie Quinn

  27. Charlie Quinn

  28. Rhonda Irwin

  29. Charlie Quinn

  30. Charlie Quinn

  31. Charlie Quinn

  32. Rhonda Irwin

  33. Charlie Quinn

  34. Charlie Quinn

  35. Rhonda Irwin

  36. Charlie Quinn

  37. Charlie Quinn

  38. Charlie Quinn

  39. Rhonda Irwin

  40. Charlie Quinn

  41. Charlie Quinn

  42. Charlie Quinn

  43. Charlie Quinn

  44. Charlie Quinn

  45. Charlie Quinn

  46. Rhonda Irwin

  47. Charlie Quinn

  48. Charlie Quinn

  49. Charlie Quinn

  50. Charlie Quinn

  51. Rhonda Irwin

  52. Charlie Quinn

  53. Charlie Quinn

  54. Charlie Quinn

  55. Charlie Quinn

  56. Rhonda Irwin

  57. Charlie Quinn

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

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  Also by Sharon Thompson

  The Abandoned

  The Healer

  To the magic.

  For Victoria.

  1

  Charlie Quinn

  I shouldn’t be taking this child up a quiet country lane but I never mean any harm. The wafts of an Irish summer breeze wisp her fine brown hair back from her pudgy cheeks. I’ve waited a long time to tell the truth. With Faye’s chubby fingers curled around mine, it is time to begin.

  ‘We thought you must have died. Nothing for sixty years, Charlie?’

  I’m supposed to answer questions like these. Instead, I leave, shrug, or sigh. It’s easier to be silent than to spill the secrets of a lifetime. There’s a lot of goodwill for me in these cooped-up rooms. Generations find my silence charming and endearing. I’m fortunate to be accepted back with little explanation or excuses.

  The darkest of souls are the quietest, yet these strangers take my silence as gentlemanly – a quirk from being away for years from the Irish chatter and craic. All I want is to be roaming free on the Canadian prairies again. Ireland’s air and the grass verges have not changed – the electricity poles are new.

  Did I walk calmly away when I left all those years ago? Or did I run towards the shore or the mountains? I know that my feet moved a damn sight easier than they do now.

  The toddler babbles and my seventy-eight-year-old heart leaps listening to the nonsense. It’s a glorious sound that only the innocence of life can make. If this generation knew of the secrets in my past would they let me wander away with their most precious future gripping my wizened finger?

  Squinting into the sun I remember with a pain in my chest how I never heard our own child make much noise. I’m sure Ella tried to convince them of her innocence. No one listened. It seems that she protected me from the truth. There’s no knowledge of what I did or didn’t do. I’m here to change all of that.

  It is hard being back. Like Oisin in the Irish legend, I’ve returned from the Land of Youth to find almost everyone important to me has gone. Thankfully, the woman I’ve come home for is most definitely alive.

  Even after all this time, my darling Ella’s name is dragged up. Someone mentioned ‘that Ella O’Brien’ outside the shops this very morning. The venom lingered in the wind and still I said nothing.

  As usual, Charlie Quinn keeps quiet.

  I can see my Ella smiling. Her full lips pucker to mine.

  Suddenly, I run away from those blue eyes and leave her to fend them all off. Sixty years ago, I scuttled away like a rat.

  A car passes us. The occupant waves and strains to see the stranger on the grass verge with a small child. In many ways, this part of Ireland hasn’t changed. There’s little that goes unnoticed on country lanes. What is being said now about me since I’ve returned? The welcomes have been sincere and hemmed with a tinge of concern. After all of these years, Charlie Quinn came back to them and he doesn’t talk as much as he should.

  The child’s mother is called Rhonda and her kitchen stifled me with the smell of roast beef. I took off into the sunshine.

  ‘Had my mammy cooked such nice things I may have stayed but we were dirt poor, pious Plymouth brethren from Tyrone,’ I tell Faye as we amble on. ‘You’re lucky not to be one of those. I never understood their minds and ways. You have a lovely home here in Sligo.’

  ‘Yes,’ the child says and toddles a bit further without my assistance. She’s a good listener; even if she’s not much of a talker. We’re alike.

  It’s not lost on me that an old man prefers the company of a two-year-old child. The women in my life might agree that I am childish. Bones creak and groan at me. In my marrow I’m still the eighteen-year-old boy who left the Irish lanes and fields in 1930 for something new.

  The Sligo air is clear, fresh and cool. I’ve missed that air. The green fields don’t spread out as much. In my memory the squares were bigger. Like the population the grass is cordoned off, owned and surrounded in stone.

  ‘Claustrophobia,’ the doctor told me it was called and I was delighted to hear it was a condition that others had. From when Father barricaded me in the barrel out the back of the byre, I knew that small spaces and me were not friends.

  I suppose it wasn’t my father’s fault. I had been bad again and needed locked away.
He was a man with morals and a sense of fatherhood, which I never inherited. He tried to make me good. I failed him over and over.

  ‘I’m a coward, child.’

  ‘Yes,’ she mutters again and looks up at me.

  Had our child dark or blue eyes? I don’t know. Ella must have hated me. I promised her everything. Did anyone else suspect? They must have.

  Oddly, there’s not a whisper of it – not a flinch of recognition when Ella is mentioned now.

  ‘Weren’t you here though, Charlie, when that woman was in the papers the first time? You know, about that Ella O’Brien? Weren’t you living here back then when it happened? It’s all back in the news recently. My own mother remembers your brother coming here to Sligo to get away from it all in the North and he brought all these newspaper clippings. He was telling us about how you lived so close to the O’Briens. He couldn’t get over how she showed no remorse. You left Tyrone around then too, eh? Weren’t you lucky. Fierce goings-on,’ Rhonda, my host says.

  Still it lingers in the minds of communities. I search their eyes for traces of connections between me and the married, older beauty. There are none. They are simply remarking about the latest media interest. That is all that stirs their gossip. I am free in the open, but locked away inside; eaten-up with the lies and the failings.

  Like this child with me now I’m still being led by my fate, taken by the hand and marched into danger.

  What might they all do when they know the truth? What will happen to the endearing old Charlie Quinn when it all becomes clear? Putting things right has dragged me across the Atlantic Ocean. I may be bitterly disappointed and I will shock those who’ve taken me in.

  I sit on the stile that should take us into the field and the child stops to suck on a blade of grass. It might tear her tiny lips and I let her do it anyway. The daisies dance up at me from between her tiny shoes.

  ‘We hadn’t meant to harm anyone,’ I tell the top of the child’s head. ‘It’s not something we planned and it tore our lives asunder. I was a boy myself and I didn’t know what I was doing.’ There’s liquid dripping from my chin and I swipe at it with my suit’s sleeve. I urge a tie away from my throat. ‘You’ve got to believe me. They’ve all got to. Despite everything I’ve done in this life I’m not a bad man.’

  ‘Yes,’ the child says suddenly and she makes a string of sounds that end in a word which sounds very like, bad!

  My old fingers curl under her chin and I stoop lower to make her look at me. She lets me do it, babbling on, ignoring my torment, paying no heed to the man who could stop her breathing. If she’s a sign of what the universe thinks of old Charlie Quinn, then I’m finished.

  ‘Bad, bad, bad.’ She stomps those little shoes and spits out the grass. The screams of Ella were loud enough to break the haze I was in and even now they pierce my ears. It takes a child to see the real Charlie Quinn.

  ‘I am sorry. Ella, I’m very sorry it has taken me this long to come home.’

  It is the child who is crying. Fear clouds her scrunched-up face and drowns her cheeks. She’s twisted in my arms, writhing homewards and breathing heavily, kicking her heels back and out against my old arms and grasp.

  I’m crying, as my spectacles steam and become laden in drops. I can hear someone calling up the road. ‘Charlie, is everything all right? Have you got Faye with you?’

  I drop the child onto the grass verge, and turn towards the sea. Even if I could, I cannot run and the sounds of cries and her father promising her that he’s coming to get her makes me heave out vomit over the stile.

  Her father picks her up and pats my back, muttering to us both, ‘It will all be all right. Don’t cry. Charlie, are you okay? What’s brought this on?’

  I want to tell him that nothing has ever been right with Charlie Quinn. Like the poor innocent toddler knows, Charlie Quinn is bad, bad, bad. I take off my glasses and blur the world as I heave my shirt tails out to clean away evidence of my guilt.

  ‘What’s up?’ the child’s father asks me. I think he’s called Joe. ‘Sure you must be wrecked. Everyone wants to know so much and it must be…’ He coughs, uncomfortable at finding me upset. If only he knew, I deserve hell itself.

  ‘Bad, bad, bad,’ Faye screams.

  ‘How right she is.’ I sniff. ‘I’m a bad man.’

  ‘I doubt that, Charlie. Rhonda will love to hear all about your life. Take it all in your own time. She doesn’t have to work on it right this minute.’ The man has to shout over Faye’s sobs. ‘We’ve got the dinner ready. Let’s get something warm into you.’

  I sense it’s been leaked out that I’m dying of cancer. At my age it’s hardly a surprise and considering I’m a monster it makes total sense that I’m being eaten from the inside out. This is a just punishment for all that I’ve done. In their eyes I’m vulnerable and in need of looking after. That adds to the guilt and the bulbous cancer growths. They swell with each kind gesture. The irony is not lost on me – I’m being killed with kindness.

  We make it back to the homestead without a word. The crying of the toddler eases into the man’s shoulder. His pretty wife accepts my tired hand into hers on the doorstep with a sympathetic nod.

  If only she knew what these hands have done. I shuffle to their downstairs bathroom and let the soap suds wash away the last few hours. The remaining members of my stranger-family wait seated around the ordered tableware and bowls of steaming food. All of them are looking expectantly at me as I enter the room.

  The child’s mother is some sort of relation. I cannot remember who she came out of or to whom she belongs. It doesn’t matter anyhow.

  I slump into the chair and she raises her voice towards me. ‘You lived in a time, Charlie, where children had more freedom. We were worried when you took Faye with you. Perhaps let us know if you go out again?’ I listen and want to offer an explanation but there isn’t one. She’s trying to be kind and there’s a forced politeness to her voice as she says, ‘I cannot wait to hear all about your life. I’m thrilled that you’re going to stay here for a while and let me write about you.’

  The toddler’s got a runny nose and she rubs it against my bony knee, smudging snot into the material. She smiles up, either forgetting or forgiving me for making her afraid.

  ‘My child’s eyes were dark,’ I tell the table of strangers who are somehow blood to me. ‘That’s what I remember most now.’

  There’s a silence and a ‘yes’ from the tiny presence at my knee.

  ‘You don’t know who I am,’ I tell them all. ‘There’s a lot about me that you won’t want to know. And still… it’s time to tell the truth.’

  2

  Charlie Quinn

  The dinner goes on while I cry into the serviette and make it into a sodden mess. The wine glass is refilled and my plate is whisked away before I embarrass the hostess by not eating a bite.

  There is an odd pat on my arm and a squeeze of my shoulder and they talk on about the weather, Ireland’s unusual soccer success in the World Cup, Haughey as Taoiseach and the reunification of Germany. I have very little to contribute and the child clings to my knee. She is not removed from there.

  Every pause in my sobbing takes me to think on all that remains unsaid and to the pain of what is to come. Their looks of pure curiosity bring me back to the sadness in my soul. Someone suggests that I move from the table but unless I can be transported out of the country there seems no reason to move at all. My discomfort is not something I can control and each heave of emotion should be the last. All should remain silent and fine – but no, I heap out cry after cry and wet napkin after napkin, while they all pretend life is grand.

  ‘I’m an old fool,’ I tell the child. ‘Faye, I’m sorry.’

  The dessert is ice cream and I manage some. Faye climbs into my lap and I feed her off my spoon and the ‘awws’ fill the room.

  ‘You’ll be fine, Charlie,’ their voices say. ‘You’re home now.’

  ‘Home,’ I whisper to Faye.

  �
��She wants to make you better,’ Rhonda, the child’s mother, says. In my youth I would have liked Rhonda’s femininity and flirted with her. I would have wanted her for my own. Marriage never meant much to me, and now I see her only as a means to an end. A way of being free of the past. She’ll help place my life in black and white. I’ll confess. Perhaps, with her help I will atone. I’m grateful to this woman and I couldn’t eat the lovely meal she made. That makes me sad too.

  ‘Faye likes you, Charlie,’ Rhonda adds.

  ‘I’ve always been good with the ladies.’ Not a hint of a wink comes from me as it is the first real truth since I crossed her threshold.

  My mother adored me. I was most certainly her favourite. Even when my youngest sister came to grace us twin boys with her annoying presence, Mother said that I still had stolen her heart. She found it hard to love the rest and she whispered this to me and a few close allies who visited to buy her eggs. Father discouraged friendships outside of the brethren. We were an oddity to ourselves as well as others. Mother married him because she was told to. In my father’s eyes she showed vanity and longed for music and colour in her life. Father swayed between lust of her youthful beauty and his need to keep her moral.