Free The Final Silence by Stuart Neville

bedroom.’
    Ida looked up from her tissue. ‘Oh? How?’
    ‘I broke in,’ Rea said. ‘I took a crowbar from the garage and forced the door.’
    ‘Och, Rea, who’s going to fix that? Why didn’t you wait and get the locksmith out again?’
    Rea dropped her gaze. ‘I found something in there.’
    ‘What? For goodness’ sake, will you just tell me what you called me back here for?’
    ‘I did a search on my phone for her name,’ Rea said. ‘Gwen Headley. She went missing in Manchester in 1992. All they ever found of her was some clothing in an alley behind the house where she shared a flat with another girl. According to the old news reports I dug up, it rained very heavily the night she disappeared, so the police never found anything useful. Just this one scrap of clothing, it didn’t say what it was. A van was seen in the area. They eventually found out its number plates were stolen off a van of the same make and colour, and a plumber’s sign was taken off another van.
    ‘This girl, Gwen, she was from Wales. She had a music degree, played clarinet. She’d stayed on in Manchester after university and got a job in a post office until she could get her music career going full time. Her parents never found out what happened to her. But
I
know.’
    Ida reached up, put a hand on her daughter’s knee. ‘Rea, love, I don’t understand. What’s this girl got to do with us?’
    ‘It’s all up there, in a book, like a wedding album. Like a scrapbook. He wrote it all down, kept pictures, press cuttings, there’s even a lock of hair and a fingernail.’
    Ida stared at her, shaking her head. ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘That girl, Gwen Headley,’ Rea said. ‘Uncle Raymond killed her.’
     
    Ida closed the book and sat back in the chair.
    ‘I can’t read any more,’ she said. ‘Is it all like that?’
    ‘I couldn’t read much more of it,’ Rea said. ‘Not in detail. A boy in Leeds, a homeless man in Dublin, a prostitute in Glasgow. And on and on. Some of them have names, some of them don’t. I counted eight altogether. Some of it’s just ranting at nothing. There are pages that make no sense at all. It reads like he was kind of coming and going. Out of his mind on one page, completely lucid the next. It’s as if he’s talking to himself sometimes. But all those people . . .’
    Ida stared at some distant point, perhaps a memory of her brother, the stranger that shared her mother.
    Rea leaned against the door frame. ‘How do you want to handle it?’
    Ida looked up at her with a lost expression on her face. ‘What do you mean, handle it?’
    ‘I mean, when we call the police. I suppose Dad will want to be careful it doesn’t affect his standing in the party, and—’
    ‘We can’t call the police,’ Ida said, shaking her head.
    ‘What are you talking about? We have to call them.’
    ‘No,’ Ida said. ‘Not without talking to your father. It could ruin him. He’d never hang on to his seat in Stormont, let alone get the Westminster candidacy. They’d drop him like a stone.’
    ‘Why?’ Rea took a step into the room. ‘It’s not his fault. He’s not even really related to Raymond. They can’t hold this against him.’
    ‘They can and they will. Doesn’t matter that he hadn’t seen Raymond in years, he barely spoke two words to him since Carol died, it doesn’t matter at all. He’ll be finished if this gets out.’
    Rea approached the table.
    ‘But what about Gwen’s parents? They never knew what happened to her. They never got to bury her. There, at the end of that section, he says what he did with her body. How can we not let them bury their daughter?’
    Ida’s voice became shrill and quivery. ‘What good will that do them? It’ll not bring her back, will it? Do you really want them to know what this person did to their wee girl? Do you even know if they’re alive?’
    ‘This person,’ Rea echoed. ‘You mean Raymond. Your brother.’
    ‘My half-brother,’ Ida said.