It Could Never Happen Here Read online

  Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Eithne Shortall, 2022

  The moral right of Eithne Shortall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 184 9

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 185 6

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 186 3

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

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  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Also by Eithne Shortall

  Love in Row 27

  Grace After Henry

  Three Little Truths

  For my dad, Billy Shortall, who made me coffee while I wrote and always served in a Seamus Heaney ‘Inspiration’ mug…

  In case you thought I didn’t notice.

  1

  ••••••

  ABERSTOWN GARDA STATION

  The parents and staff filed into the police station. Pristine coats hung from their confident shoulders, and huddles quickly began to form. A few threw glances in Garda Joey Delaney’s direction and he did his best to look authoritative from his position behind the reception desk. He lifted his blink-and-you’d-miss-it backside from the swivel chair, placed both hands on his belt and yanked it up, ready for action.

  ‘Delaney, get in here!’

  The young guard swung around to see his superior, Sergeant James Whelan, already disappearing back into his office.

  He gave the belt one further hoist and quick-stepped it in after him.

  ‘The first batch seem to all be here now, sir.’

  Whelan lowered himself into the chair with a groan. The sergeant was forty-six – exactly twice Joey’s age – but he moved like a man of far greater years. Garda Corrigan pointed this out to him once and Whelan snapped that being tethered to useless eejits such as him was slowing him down.

  ‘Did you mark their names off the list?’

  Joey had expected the parents to approach the desk and formally check in, but most of them had ignored him entirely. ‘I’ll go around now and do a roll-call.’

  ‘You do that. I’ll just finish up in here, and then we’ll get started.’ The sergeant lifted the remains of what looked like a chicken sandwich from his desk and took a bite.

  ‘Do you think they’ll know anything, sir?’

  ‘If there’s anything to know, that lot will be in the loop.’ The sergeant nodded towards the door, to the staff and parents of Glass Lake Primary beyond. ‘They pride themselves on it.’

  Glass Lake was a sought-after school located one town over in Cooney. Curtains were due to go up on its annual musical tonight and even Joey had a ticket. He wouldn’t normally be too keen on watching a bunch of twelve-year-olds perform The Wizard of Oz, but the other officers insisted the school’s shows were always unmissable. ‘West End quality at West Cork prices,’ was how Corrigan had put it. Not that it mattered now. There would be no musical tonight, or any other night this week. Obviously.

  Joey nodded, hands on belt, as he marched out of the sergeant’s office and over to the desk where he had left the clipboard of witness names. He was determined not to be another useless eejit slowing the sergeant down.

  He cast an eye over the list and then over the busy waiting area. Yesterday evening, this lot had been up at Glass Lake, getting the auditorium ready. Now, they were in Aberstown Garda Station preparing to give their two cents on the body that had been pulled from the River Gorm while they were busy painting the Yellow Brick Road and putting finishing touches to Munchkin costumes.

  They were still waiting on the initial post-mortem results and Joey knew the most likely cause of death was accidental. Eleven months he had been a qualified guard stationed at Aberstown and, until yesterday, there hadn’t been a reason to switch on the siren of the station’s sole patrol car.

  This wasn’t a part of the world where robberies happened, never mind murders.

  Still, thought Joey, as he hitched up his trousers and strode over to the whispering masses, there was no harm in keeping an open mind.

  Extracts from witness statements, as recorded by Garda Joey Delaney

  Mairead Griffin, school secretary

  It was pandemonium yesterday evening. It’s been pandemonium ever since the parents learned this year’s musical was going to be on television. They’ve been turning up in their dual roles of legal guardians and Hollywood agents, and God help us all if their child isn’t standing right where the cameras are going to be. If a single one of them noticed anyone was missing – if they noticed anything other than how high their child’s name was listed in the programme - then let me know and I’ll keel over right here and die of shock.

  Susan Mitchem, parent

  I fully support postponing the musical – a mark of respect, absolutely – but I had a casting agent coming to see my son and I’ve had no clarity on when to reschedule the train tickets for. I’m in serious danger of losing my money. The whole thing is tragic, one hundred per cent, but as the old maxim goes: the show must go on.

  Mrs Walsh, teacher

  It’s just so sad, isn’t it? Imagine how cold it must be in the water, especially at this time of year. A tragic, tragic accident – and this town has had enough of those. My thoughts are with the family. You hear about these things on the news, but you don’t really think about it, not properly, not until it happens to one of your own.

  2

  ••••••

  FIFTEEN DAYS EARLIER

  The front door opened, and Christine Maguire leapt from the sitting room into the hallway, knitting needles and almost-completed teddy bear left languishing on the sofa.

  She held her index finger to her lips and gestured up the stairs.

  ‘Well?’ she whispered. ‘Did you find him?’

  Her husband removed the thick thermal gloves the kids had bought him for his birthday. ‘I’ve got four pieces of news,’ he said. ‘Three pieces of good news and one piece of bad news.’

  ‘Jesus, Conor. Did you find the cat or not?’

  Christine was the only member of the family who hadn’t wanted a cat. Hers was the one vote, out of the five of them, for a dog. (Brian wrote ‘porcupine’ on his piece of paper, but given the options were ‘dog’ or ‘cat’, her son’s ballot had been registered as spoiled.) The animal had sensed Christine’s outlier position from day one and returned the disdain ten-fold. And yet here she was, unable to go to bed until she knew the damn creature was safe.

  ‘I found him,’ said her husband, undoing his jacket. ‘Porcupine is alive and well.’ (Such was Brian’s aggrievement at being excluded from the democratic process that they’d allowed the seven-year-old to choose the pet’s name.)

  ‘Thank God.’ Christine leaned back against the wall and glanced up the stairs. ‘Maybe now Maeve will go to sleep.’

  ‘They’re t
he first two pieces of good news.’

  She watched him jostle with the coat rack. ‘What’s the third?’

  ‘He’s being very well cared for in Mrs Rodgers’ house.’

  ‘Mrs Rodgers, of course! Why didn’t we think of that?’

  Rita Rodgers was an older lady who lived at the end of their street and spent a lot of time tending to her rose bushes – a real jewel in Cooney’s Tidy Towns crown. The local pets were known to stop by and keep her company while their owners were out. She’d lived a fascinating life – literally ran away with the circus – and she exuded a worldly calm. Christine often said they were lucky to have Mrs Rodgers on their street; she was a reminder to stop and smell the (prize-winning) roses.

  ‘Good old Mrs Rodgers, ay?’ she said. ‘We should drop her down a box of chocolates, to say thank you. I can pick something up tomorrow. I’ll go tell Maeve that all is well.’

  Their middle child had added Porcupine’s disappearance to her ever-expanding list of things to lose sleep over. Other items included the teddy bear she was supposed to have finished knitting for school tomorrow (hence Christine currently committing late-night forgery) and a sudden, strong fear that she would not be involved in the Glass Lake musical.

  Maeve didn’t want to act in the production, which was a pity; she was the only one of Christine’s children with the looks for stardom. (She wasn’t a bad mother for thinking that. Maeve was her prettiest child, but Caroline was the most intelligent, and Brian the most likeable. Everyone went home with a prize.) Maeve wanted to work on costumes, but some other girl was already signed up to do that. Christine didn’t see the problem. It was a school show staged by a bunch of pre-teens. Surely the attitude should be: the more the merrier.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said, as Conor continued to mess around with the coat rack. It did not take that long to hang up a jacket, even if you approached things with as much precision as her husband. ‘What’s the bad news?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh.’ Conor frowned at the woollen collar as he attached it to a hook. ‘She doesn’t want to give him back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mrs Rodgers, yes. I was surprised too. But she was quite firm about it. I always thought she was dithery, but I guess that was ageism. She’s actually impressively sharp. She knows we’re gone from the house for at least seven hours every day and that Porcupine is left on his own. She did this bit where she opened the front door wide and told Porcupine that he was free to go. Go on now if you’re going, she said. And Porcupine looked up at her and meowed. Now I know he meows all the time, especially when he’s hungry or when it’s early and—’

  ‘Yes, Conor, I’m familiar with the cat’s meow.’

  ‘Right. But this was different. This meow sounded like a word.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘A human word, I mean.’

  Christine squinted at her husband, who was supposed to be the brains of the family. He raised his hands in a wait-for-it gesture.

  She waited.

  ‘And it sounded … like, “No”.’

  Christine smacked her lips.

  Conor nodded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know,’ he said, still nodding. ‘Crazy. Porcupine did not budge. I took off my hat, so he’d recognise me, but nothing. He just stood at her feet, loyal as you like. I have to say, it was very impressive.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What could I do? She was very nice about it. She explained that we were very busy – which is true, you said the same thing when we first talked about getting a cat – and probably didn’t have a lot of time. But she has plenty of time and lots of space. She’s an animal person, and she’d really cherish the company. I could almost hear her rattling around in the place, the poor woman. You know her husband died?’

  ‘Yes, forty years ago, Conor! And they were separated. She left the man for a tightrope walker!’

  ‘If we were separated and you died, I’d still be sad.’

  ‘What? Conor, no! She stole our cat!’

  Now it was her husband’s turn to put his finger to his lips and gesture towards the stairs. ‘Porcupine looked happy. I know it’s only been a couple of days, but he looked fatter.’

  ‘That cat couldn’t get any fatter.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so annoyed, Christine. You never liked him anyway.’

  ‘She stole our cat! She cannot just steal our cat!’ Christine caught her voice before it escalated to a full-on roar. That woman, their nice, old, butter-wouldn’t-melt neighbour, had abducted their pet. How many times had Mrs Rodgers called out ‘Busy today?’ as Christine hurried past her house? When Christine called back ‘Up to my eyes, Mrs Rodgers’, she’d assumed she was making polite chitchat, not fashioning the noose for her own hanging. ‘I should have known,’ she raged. ‘I should have known she wasn’t the person she said she was. The Tidy Towns committee asked everyone on the street to leave some grass and dandelions in their gardens, but she just eviscerated it all. Animal person, my foot! She doesn’t give a damn about the bees!’

  ‘To be fair now, Christine, we’re not too worried about the bees ourselves. I just haven’t got around to fixing the lawnmower.’

  ‘And how, exactly, could Porcupine look happy? That animal has one expression and it is smug.’

  ‘Well,’ Conor conceded, ‘he looked sort of smugly happy.’

  ‘Doesn’t she already have a cat? A white and ginger thing?’

  ‘I have a memory of seeing her with a brown one,’ said Conor, ‘but maybe not. That was a while ago.’

  To think how many times Christine had stopped to compliment Mrs Rodgers on her ‘organic’ roses, knowing full well the charlatan was using chemical fertilisers. The Maguires lived on the same street, they had the same soil, and they could barely grow grass. But Christine never said a word. And when Mrs Rodgers won the intercounty garden prize, she’d written an article about it – she’d even pushed to get a picture of the old bat and her performance-enhanced bushes on to the front page.

  ‘So, what? We leave him there? And then what? What are we going to tell the kids? What are you going to tell Maeve?’

  ‘We’ll just explain that Porcupine is an individual,’ said Conor. ‘He was a kitten but now he’s a cat and he’s decided to move out, like the three of them will one day …’

  Christine threw her head back and hooted.

  She prided herself on being able to see her children for who they were. In Maeve’s case, that was an anxious, conscientious little oddball. Dr Flynn had diagnosed her constant worries as ‘intrusive thoughts’ and said some children found comfort in prayer. But Conor was resolutely atheist – except when it came to ensuring their children got into Glass Lake Primary: then he was all for standing beside a baptismal fountain and shouting ‘Get behind me, Satan’ – so he bought her a set of worry dolls instead. Christine could have sworn their sewn-on smiles were already starting to droop.

  Then, right on cue, their eleven-year-old daughter appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Why aren’t you asleep, Maevey?’ Conor called up.

  ‘I was saying prayers for Porcupine. Did they work? Has he come home?’

  ‘I’ve found Porcupine,’ said Conor, ignoring the first portion of the question. ‘And he’s alive and well.’

  Maeve gasped and started to run down the stairs.

  ‘No, hang on, hang on. He’s not here. He’s at Mrs Rodgers’ house.’

  ‘Why is he at Mrs Rodgers’ house?’ Maeve directed this question towards her mother but, with a swing of the head, Christine lobbed it on to Conor.

  ‘He’s, well …’ Conor looked to his wife, then down at their daughter, his lips curled into a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. That was his first mistake. Kids could spot a ‘bad news’ smile a mile away. ‘When we got Porcupine, he was a kitten. But now, now he’s all grown up. He’s graduated from kitten college. He’s passed his feline driving test. He’s an adult, he’s a cat ...’

&nb
sp; Maeve’s face shifted involuntarily.

  ‘… and when people, and animals, grow up, they move out of home. When I was a child, I lived with your granny and grandad, but then I grew up and now I live here with you …’

  There it was again, a spasm just under the left eye. Christine winced in sympathy. A twitch. Wonderful. Just what the girl needed.

  ‘… and when you grow up, you’ll move out of this house too.’

  ‘But I don’t want to move out.’

  ‘It won’t happen for a long time.’

  ‘I don’t want to move out,’ repeated Maeve, her voice creeping higher. ‘I want to stay here. Mom? Do I have to move out? What if a baddie broke in or the house went on fire and I didn’t know because I was asleep and there was nobody there to wake me or what if—’

  ‘This is way, way in the future, Maevey,’ explained Conor as the child’s breathing grew louder. ‘By then you’ll be big, and you’ll want to go. Caroline will move out first—’

  ‘Caroline’s moving out?’

  Conor flinched. ‘No, she’s—’

  ‘Why is Caroline moving out?!’

  ‘I just meant because Caroline’s older, she’s fourteen and you’re only—’

  ‘Shush now, Maeve, breathe normally. It’s all right. Caroline’s not going anywhere,’ said Christine, deciding her daughter’s mental well-being should probably trump a learning opportunity for her husband. ‘None of you are. We’re all staying here, until we’re old and grey and roaming around the house with walking sticks. All right? Okay?’

  ‘And Porcupine is staying too? Until he’s old and grey?’

  ‘I’m not sure … Conor?’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘He’s …’ Conor suddenly looked very tired. ‘Yes. Porcupine is staying too. He’s just having a sleepover at Mrs Rodgers’ house.’

  ‘A sleepover.’ Maeve rolled the word around, deciding whether to believe it.