Declan had run to find the search party once his stomach was completely empty of all its contents. He’d run, crying, his tears mixing with snot and spit as he shouted as loud as he could for help. Mortified in his piss-stained trousers, his own vomit down the front of his duffel coat. He tried to be brave, but he couldn’t. He could only scream until he was heard and then he led the men back to the water’s edge. He’d prayed all the way back that he was wrong and it wasn’t Kelly. It was just a pile of rubbish and the figure he had seen had been a product of his vivid imagination. But it wasn’t. It was all too real.

And it was worse than he could’ve imagined. Kelly’s da arrived and could not be held back. He was roaring like a wounded animal and lashing out at anyone who tried to stop him. He was up to his knees in the water and he hauled Kelly towards him, turning her over, pushing the tendrils of her hair away from her face so that he could see her. Her face. Blue. Grey. Black in places. Her lips were black. Declan remembered that. Her eyes glassy, open. Like those of the fish he saw on the counter at Stewarts Supermarket. She looked funny. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha, he had thought to himself – the phrase his own da would use popping into his head.

But funny wasn’t the right word. Or peculiar. Maybe just wrong. She looked wrong.

Her features were bloated. Almost a caricature of what she once was. Her father took her hand, the same black and blue and grey and green. He remembered that. He’d always remember that. Just as he would remember how the tips of her fingers were bloodied, nails black. Her hands twisted and bruised. Her dress ripped. He saw her knickers. He was mortified at that. How he saw her knickers, how, even in the circumstances, he registered that it was something he wouldn’t normally see. Just like with everything else, though, he couldn’t look away.

That would haunt him in the days, and weeks and months ahead. That he didn’t look away. Did that make him a pervert? Did that make him wrong?

He couldn’t bring himself to talk about any of it. Not to Niall. Not to his ma or his da. Not to the policeman who sat on the good armchair and asked him questions while drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits.

He’d just shrug his shoulders and shake his head. ‘I dunno,’ he’d mutter if pushed. But mostly he just wanted people to stop asking questions. What chance would he have to forget any of it if people kept going over the same old questions, time and time again?

It started to make him angry.

Chapter Six

Ingrid

Thursday, 17 October 2019