Free The Final Silence by Stuart Neville Page B

father started making calls to his friends and colleagues in the party. He got the nomination for the next council election and comfortably won his seat.
    For twenty-three years, Rea had told herself the timing was a coincidence, though she never quite believed it in her heart.
    Now the Assembly at Stormont; next, Westminster.
    Graham Carlisle had been a man of liberal views, but Rea had watched him turn into one of the grey men of unionism, moulded by the party, becoming more and more conservative as he progressed through the ranks. He had allowed his own beliefs to wither under the shadow of his ambition, no longer a man of principle but a company man, toeing the line set down by his superiors.
    When a party leader had expressed the most archaic homophobic views on a late night BBC news panel, her father had been among the first to defend him the following morning. He trotted out the party policy on gay marriage, said it was against the moral beliefs of the majority of Northern Ireland’s citizens. Rea had watched Graham on the lunchtime news, truly ashamed of her father for the first time in her life. It gave Rea an ache in her breast to see him turning so stony and cold that she barely remembered the man who had held her close as an infant.
    ‘Well?’ Rea asked.
    ‘I’m thinking,’ Graham said, not slowing his step, back and forth, back and forth. He took his glasses off, the fine-framed pair he thought made him look sophisticated, and tapped the tip of the leg against his teeth.
    Rea leaned against the wall, next to the map of the British Isles. Ida had taken the seat at the desk as soon as Graham had vacated it. She had moved it to the other side of the room, as far away from the book as she could manage.
    Graham paused halfway across the floor. ‘How do we even know this is real? What if it’s just some sick fantasy of Raymond’s? Maybe it was all in his head. You said yourself, some of it sounds like he’s away with the fairies.’
    ‘It’s real, Dad,’ Rea said. ‘I looked up Gwen Headley’s name online. It’s all there, how she went missing, all of it.’
    Graham snorted. ‘Oh, it’s on the Internet, so it must be true.’
    ‘It’s on every newspaper website that has an archive going back that far. All the papers reported it at the time. It’s real. And her parents are still wondering what happened to her.’
    ‘If they’re alive,’ Graham said.
    Ida leaned forward in the chair. ‘That’s what I said. Didn’t I say that? They could be dead and buried, for all we know.’
    Rea shook her head. ‘They’d be in their sixties by now, maybe their seventies. Not that much older than you. They’re probably still alive. Still wondering. And it’s not just them. There are other people in the book. Men and women. They all had families, they all had mothers and fathers.’
    ‘Well, I don’t see how this is our problem,’ Graham said. ‘They have my sympathy for what they’ve gone through, but it’s not our place to find answers for them.’
    Rea fought to keep the anger down. ‘What do you mean it’s not our problem? How can it be anyone else’s? Look at the information we have. It’s been our problem since the moment Raymond died.’
    Her father approached the desk, and the book that rested there. He reached for the leather-bound cover and closed it.
    ‘We’ll destroy it,’ he said.
    ‘What?’ Rea stepped away from the wall, the anger pushing up and out of her.
    ‘We’ll make a fire in the back garden and burn the book.’
    ‘No.’ Rea’s nails dug into her palms. ‘No, we can’t. How could you do that to them?’
    ‘I’m not doing anything to anybody. Raymond’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone now, and nothing’s going to help that poor girl’s family.’
    ‘What if it was me?’ Rea asked.
    ‘Don’t,’ Ida said, looking up from her hands.
    ‘But what if it was? You’d want to know what happened to me, wouldn’t you? You’d want my body back.’
    Graham’s face