a sister, a friend. Some poor family was about to have their whole world turned upside down.
It was just another reminder that life was short – too bloody short – and as clichéd as it sounds, we don’t know what lies around the corner for any of us. If I’d known this time last year what the following twelve months would bring I might have run away or hidden under my duvet and refused to come out.
I would have wanted to hit pause, but of course I couldn’t. The world kept turning anyway – even though I felt mine had ended with the death of my mother – sixty-five. No age at all. Breast cancer.
I hated that when I talked about her to new people now, the conversation always seemed to wind its way round to how she died. Like it defined her. That final, stupid, too-short battle. Surely everything else she’d done in her life should have mattered more?
I slid my phone back into my bag and along with it I buried my emotions for now. I had to get in front of a classroom of thirty demob-happy youngsters and keep them focused.
At lunchtime, in the staffroom, I pulled my phone from my bag again. Switched it on and looked at it. No substantial updates from the Derry Journal except a photo from the scene – dark hedgerows, bright sunshine. In the distance, beyond the bright yellow, almost festive police tape, there was an ambulance and what looked like the top of one of those white forensic police tents.
Local political representatives were expressing their ‘shock and sadness’, all of them saying it was important not to jump to conclusions until the police had more information. All the police had said so far was that the road would remain closed for some time and that they were appealing for witnesses in relation to the ‘fatality’.
‘We’re appealing for anyone who travelled along the Coney Road on the evening of 5 June or the early hours of 6 June who may have seen any unusual activity to come forward and speak to police.’
I clicked out of the link, tried to join in the chat around the table. The looming end of term meant it wasn’t just the pupils who were feeling giddy at the thought of the long summer break. Still, this news story had brought a sombre feel to the classroom.
‘It’s awful,’ I heard Mr McCallion, one of the geography teachers, say. ‘I heard, from someone who knows these things, that it looks like a murder. A particularly gruesome one at that.’
‘What?’ Ms Doherty, our young, quirky, opinionated art teacher chimed in. ‘Like, is there any kind of a murder that isn’t gruesome? The two tend to go hand in hand,’ she said with a roll of her eyes and a smile that showed she was amused at her own wit.
‘I don’t think us gossiping about it is very appropriate,’ I snapped.
I couldn’t help it. The feeling that some poor woman had lost her life shouldn’t be the subject of staffroom banter. Maybe my own grief had made me raw to it all. Ms Doherty said nothing, but the look she gave me spoke a thousand words. She thought I was a killjoy, a fuddy-duddy. Someone bereft of ‘craic’. She hadn’t known me before my mother died. Before I’d been changed, utterly.
My phone beeped again with a text message from one of my oldest friends, Julie:
Have you heard anything from Clare? She didn’t go into work today. I called round her flat but there was no answer and her phone is off. You know, it’s not like her – and there’s been that woman found …
Julie was always prone to drama and tended to jump directly to the worst possible conclusion about everything, but this time a nagging, sickening feeling started to wash over me. Julie, Clare and I had remained the very best of friends after we’d left school. While I’d trained to teach English, they’d both joined the Civil Service and worked for the Pensions Department on Duke Street. They didn’t do anything without the other knowing.
I immediately tried calling Clare myself, I don’t know why. I hoped for some sort of rational and reasonable explanation as to why she wouldn’t have got Julie’s call. When it went straight to answer service, I wondered who else I could call to try to find her. It would be a bit hysterical to call the hospital, wouldn’t it? I mean, she was a grown woman. She could be anywhere. She might be with her parents. Out with another friend. She’d been seeing someone lately, someone she’d admitted to developing deep feelings for. She could be lying in post-coital bliss in his bed right now, being decadent and loved-up for once in her up-to-now sensible life. I almost envied her, if she was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been post-coital anything, never mind blissed-out.
I was about to call Julie back, when my phone rang and her name popped up on the screen. I answered, said hello, expected her to tell me Clare had just rolled into work, hungover but happy.
I hadn’t expected the breathless, sobbing, gasping, almost screaming cry of my friend.
‘It’s her, Rachel. It’s Clare. She’s dead.’
I was sitting in front of the kitchen range, shaking. I winced at the sweetness of the tea I’d been given for the shock.
I had just been too late. Even if I’d got to her an hour before, it would probably still have been too late to save her. She shouldn’t really have survived for as long as she did – her wounds were so severe.
‘Mrs O’Loughlin, if we can just go over your statement one more time,’ the kindly-faced police officer said to me.
He’d been lovely. So gentle in his manner. So sorry for what I’d been through, even though I wasn’t the victim here. Not at all.
‘I’m not sure I’ve anything more to tell you,’ I said, placing the cup on the kitchen table, the shake in my hand more pronounced than it normally was. ‘I can’t think of anything more.’
My brain was trying to process the trauma. I knew that. In my younger years I’d worked as a theatre nurse. Cared for many survivors of catastrophic traumas – the de facto warzone that Derry had been during the Troubles meant I saw more than most. Heard more than most. Lost limbs, blast wounds, burns, gunshots, a child who couldn’t be saved, whose body was broken beyond repair by the impact of a car bomb.
Images were coming at me now. Fast. Horrific. I shook my head to try to get rid of them, but they didn’t go. They wouldn’t go and now I had these flashes of that woman, her orange T-shirt and linen trousers – blood-soaked, mud-soaked, wet through. Her eyes, flickering, closed. That wound, jagged, vicious, intentional. The soft warmth of her last breath on my cheek. How gentle it had been for someone who was taken from the world so violently.
‘And you saw no traces of anyone else along the road? No cars passed as you were out walking?’
I shook my head. It had been so quiet. Blissfully quiet.
‘It’s a quiet road at the best of times, especially at that hour of the morning,’ I told him as one of his colleagues offered to refill my teacup.
‘I imagine,’ he said. ‘And she just said those two words? “Warn them”? Nothing more at all?’
‘Well, my hearing isn’t
