He followed her down Wellington Quay, across the Halfpenny Bridge to Bachelor’s Walk, and watched her go into the Blessed Sacrament Church. He thought about following her, then changed his mind, not because it was inappropriate but because he couldn’t bring himself to go in there. Not in there. Not with what was going on with him.
He turned round and made his way back to his flat.
Colin Maguire’s sister, Deirdre, put a pot of tea down in front of him, with a blueberry muffin, his favourite. Anything to cheer him up, despite the fact the weight he was piling on was obvious. She just wanted to make him happy. Her poor baby brother had been through enough already and now that his wife, Simone, and the kids had moved out ‘for a break’, he needed her more than ever. Since the day it all happened he hadn’t shown any sign of anger. She was waiting for it to happen, she was waiting for the day that he would explode. She didn’t want to be here when it happened but she knew she would have to be. He didn’t have anybody else. Plenty who supported him were there to give him the thumbs up on the street, or a slap on the back in the pub, but they weren’t there for him, not really.
‘Thanks, Dee,’ he said gently, keeping an eye on the television.
‘No problem. Are you sure you don’t want to come out with us for lunch? It’s a nice carvery. Neil says they put the football on a big screen. The kids will be there and they’d love to see you.’
‘Nah. Thanks, though.’ He gave her a small smile. ‘I’ll just watch it here.’
Deirdre stood up and stretched, she looked out the window. ‘She’s there again.’
Colin didn’t need to ask who. He looked out the window briefly, seeing across the road to the green and beyond.
‘Did you know that already?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because I’m not in the mood to run chasing after you across the green with a frying pan in your hand.’
‘Frying pan? I’d do a lot better than that, believe me,’ she fumed, hands on hips, looking out. ‘How many times is this? The second? Third?’
‘Fourth, I think.’
‘What the hell is she doing?’ She moved closer to the window to watch her.
‘Don’t, Dee, she’ll see you.’
‘I want her to bloody well see me. I don’t know what she’s planning but I swear to God I want to go out and deck her.’
‘Dee, stop.’ He said it so gently it made her drop her angry stance immediately. He was like their daddy: just didn’t seem to be able to have any anger in him at all. Too soft, too gentle, too ready to be there to listen to other people’s problems. That’s what had got him in this mess in the first place. He should have let that stupid schoolgirl go off home with whatever problems she had that day instead of trying to console her. She’d taken him up wrong, read into his kindness too much and he’d paid for her embarrassment.
She sighed, ‘I don’t know how you do it, Colin. If I was you I’d want to go out there and do God knows what to her. Okay, I’ll be late if I don’t go now. If you change your mind about lunch let me know. We’ll be there from two on, okay?’ She kissed her brother on the head and left.
Colin made sure his sister drove the other way, not trusting her not to mow down the reporter. When she was gone and the house returned to the quiet he still couldn’t get used to since Simone said she needed time to herself to think about their future, he took the paper from behind the cushion in the couch and he laid it out on the coffee table before him. He looked at the photo of Katherine Logan on the front of the paper, the happy smiling face, and then inside, the woman who left the courthouse and he read the article again.
When he looked out the window again, she was gone.
The door to Etcetera’s offices was left open when Kitty arrived, which added to her anticipation and overall impending sense of doom. It said to her, come on in if you dare, the door’s open, you have no choice now. The office was deserted – it was Sunday morning – and Pete could do anything to her here and nobody would hear her scream. She was pinning all her hopes on Bob coming to her rescue but the article was probably enough to send him over the edge too, as Etcetera were implicated as losing advertisers and being in financial trouble. Not good press.
When she entered Constance’s office, Pete was standing, as usual, at the desk with the phone glued to his ear. He was wearing his weekend casuals, a look Kitty wasn’t used to seeing on him, and again it struck her that he looked younger, more attractive than the jacket-wearing stressed-out egomaniac who patrolled the offices. He looked up at Kitty’s approach and his face darkened.
‘Gary, can I call you back?’ He hung up abruptly. ‘That was Gary. A solicitor that I’ve been on the phone to all morning trying to figure out where we stand on all of this.’
‘What do you mean, a solicitor?’
‘You did read the paper this morning?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘But I forgot, you didn’t need to, you already knew what the story was before it was printed. You see, there’s a little bit there about Etcetera’s advertisers apparently pulling out if you are not suspended.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘And so the other advertisers who weren’t going to pull their money are now in a panic as to whether they should do the same or not, because paying for advertising in this magazine apparently makes them look bad,’ he ended in a shout.
Kitty’s eyes widened and she jumped a little at the volume of his voice. She had never seen him this angry before. Bitching, stressed and bad-tempered, yes, but never like this.
‘You think I did this deliberately?’ Her voice cracked. ‘Jesus, Pete, if I wanted to tell my side of the story, I’d have done it a whole lot better, don’t you think? I was on my way home from working on the story when I ran into an old college friend who seemed to have no idea about what happened with Thirty Minutes. So we went for drinks to catch up and in the space of an entire night – yes, an entire night, Pete, because it wasn’t enough that he used me for a story, he had to go and degrade me and make me feel like a complete whore in the process – I talked about what had happened, of course I did, because I was upset. It’s all been very stressful and I decided to talk to somebody about it, somebody who was totally unrelated to this world, a man who told me he was writing a novel, for Christ’s sake, and who seemed to care, and when I woke up this morning I find that crap splashed all over the paper and I’m really exhausted because I had to sleep on a friend’s couch so I am humiliated and mortified and extremely sorry, okay? I’m really sorry.’ She hadn’t realised she was crying until Pete held out a tissue to her and she felt her wet cheeks and her nose running.
‘Okay,’ he said gently. ‘Okay, that’s a different story entirely. I’m sorry for getting the wrong idea.’
Kitty simply nodded her thanks and continued wiping her streaming eyes.
‘Is it true about the attacks on your flat?’
‘Last night it was firecrackers. A firecracker roll, apparently. Five thousand of them. Hence the sleep on a couch.’
‘Jesus, that could have been dangerous,’ he