We present an extract from Where They Lie, the debut crime novel by Claire Coughlan.
Dublin, 1943: Actress Julia Bridges disappears.The last sighting of her is entering the house of Gloria Fitzpatrick, who is later put on trial for the murder of another woman whose abortion she facilitated.But it's never proved that Gloria had a hand in Julia’s death – and Julia’s body has never been found. Gloria, however, is sentenced to life in an institution for the criminally insane, until her apparent suicide a few years later, and the truth of what happened to Julia Bridges dies with her. Dublin, 1968: Nicoletta Sarto is an ambitious junior reporter for the Irish Sentinel when the bones of Julia Bridges are discovered in the garden of a house on the outskirts of Dublin. Drawn into investigating the 25-year-old mystery of Julia’s disappearance and her link to the notorious Gloria Fitzpatrick, the story takes Nicoletta into the tangled underworld of the illegal abortion industry, stirring up long-buried secrets from her own past...
Monday, 23rd December 1968
Some stories demand to be told. They keep coming back, echoing down through the decades, until they find a teller.
There must have been a time before; when silence prevailed, and Nicoletta's days and nights weren’t filled with the hum of voices, guttural shouts of 'Copy!’ at the copy boys’ pattering stampede across the grubby lino to grab the black page from the waiting reporter and take it to the case room. But she likes to think her life began here; was forged at this wall of noise. The clack, clack of typewriters is a sound she’ll never tire of, if she lives to be eighty. The Irish Sentinel holds her in the present. It makes sense in a way nothing else does. She observes this peculiar space properly now the newsroom is almost empty. The strip lighting, wide, curtainless windows, fogged with condensation, laying bare the souls within, puts her in mind of a stage.
She misses the sound of the typewriters now they have fallen still. One of the two copy boys on duty is asleep under his coat, his snores oozing along the floor like spilled coffee. The printing presses have yet to start rolling in the basement, signalling the end of the shift as surely as church bells, but there is already talk of giving up the ghost and going to a nearby early house for some welcome festive cheer. Nicoletta sits resolute, her back ramrod straight. She hasn’t been invited on the premature flit to the pub as she’s been tasked with working the NightTown shift. She feeds each hour with regular phone calls to Dublin’s Garda stations. Pearse Street, Harcourt Street, Store Street, Dun Laoghaire, Howth. Each time someone answers, she hesitates before saying a variation on the same thing. It’s like a rehearsed party piece, glib and singsong. It never comes out quite the way it did in her head. And each time, she gets the same reply. Nothing doing. It’s Christmas, after all.
‘Good morning, Nicoletta Sarto calling from the Sentinel . . . anything to report? OK, thank you . . . Happy Christmas! Bye . . . bye.’ She’s ashamed of the blush that spreads across her cheeks as she replaces the receiver in its cradle, the toll of easing out the words contrasting with Barney, Price and Dermot’s brash nonchalance. The men speak each other’s language. They have long-established relationships with the Guards, connections that zigzag across colliding ley lines. Presumably, their hearts don’t hammer in their chests every time they pick up the phone.
‘What’s the story? Grand, buzz you back in a while. Cheers.’ Barney, the assistant news editor, sits at his desk, shuffling papers from his in-tray, sighing. She watches him stand up and begin to circle the mostly empty room like a nervous hawk, crossing from the news desk to make the occasional call. She longs for him to come over and take one of Dermot’s cigarettes, half leaning against her desk to talk. But he doesn’t. Dermot, a fellow reporter, is nowhere to be seen, and Barney doesn’t lift his head in her direction. A question hangs in the air between them, heavy as stale smoke.
She gets up to look out on the dark blanket of sky. Even the stars are hiding. She leans against the windowsill and waits for something, anything. She is good at waiting, at picking her moment. She accepts that sometimes there are no stories. That’s when it’s time to sit back and listen. She’ll wonder in the ensuing days and years which twist of fate led them to Gloria Fitzpatrick in that late night lull, as though by design.
It starts with a throwaway remark from Duffy, the editor. He joins Nicoletta at the window, resting most of his compact, meaty frame against a squat metal filing cabinet, lighting one of Dermot’s cigarettes, and following her gaze along the murky sludge of the river below to the empty quay, shadowy and silent at this hour. He taps ash into a mostly empty coffee cup. He’s not a tall man, though wider than the filing cabinet.
‘Is it always this quiet?’ When she asks the question, with a nervous laugh, Duffy straightens up.
‘It’s always half dead on this shift.’ He’s contemplative for a moment. ‘The only major Christmas story I can think of was Gloria Fitzpatrick. Sentenced to hang in ’56.’
Nicoletta shivers as an icy draught seeps in through a crack in the pane. She inclines her head to Duffy, and he catches her gaze in the glass. His round face is shiny, but kind. Still, despite his cuddly appearance, Duffy is feared by some. His bite is much worse than his bark; more of a terrier than a Rottweiler.
Nicoletta forces a tentative smile. ‘What was that like?’
There’s a tread of footsteps behind them and Price, the deputy editor, joins them, towering above them both. He’s quickly joined by Barney, who’s already wearing his coat, a full-length camel hair he’s inordinately proud of, his sandy hair styled into a rigid peak.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I was telling Nicoletta about the last major Christmas story,’ Duffy says thoughtfully. ‘Gloria Fitzpatrick. The very last woman in the history of the state to get the death penalty, though of course it was later commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of insanity.’ He blows a stream of smoke straight ahead, which fogs the window. Nicoletta coughs as discreetly as she can.
‘A long while ago,’ Barney says, shrugging. ‘Time now to go to the pub for a pint or two.’
‘We’ll go when I say we go.’ Duffy’s voice is soft, but Barney gets the message and shuts up.
Nicoletta taps her foot, unwilling to let the name sink out of sight, the way a seagull will dive after its quarry, right into the murky depths of the river.
‘Fitzpatrick . . . I haven’t heard that name in a long time.’
Duffy nods. ‘The infamous Fitzpatrick. They got her in the end, for Elizabeth Rourke, but she never would give the Guards the whereabouts of the missing actress.’
‘You don’t mean . . . Julia Bridges? Was Gloria Fitzpatrick responsible for her death?’ she asks, almost holding her breath.
Duffy rubs a circle in the condensation, round as a ship’s porthole, and drops the cigarette stub into the cup, where it sizzles in half an inch of tepid coffee.
"The very same..."
Where They Lie is published by Simon & Schuster
