I Saw You by Julie Parsons Read Free Book Online Page A

from her broad
forehead, her face a white mask, her eyebrows dark slashes, like paint. Her son was very like her. Their bodies seemed to cleave to each other. He opened the album and turned the pages, looking for
the empty space from which the cutting had come. He picked up his glass and drank. Then he began to read.
    By the time he got up from the table it was dark outside. Three more empty bottles of Erdinger had joined the first under the table. His foot knocked against them as he pushed back his chair and
stood up. He leaned down and gathered them together. A four-bottle job, he thought. Like in the old days when they’d go to the pub after their shift was over and sit in the snug for the rest
of the evening, going through whatever case it was they were working on. A six-pint night would be the usual. And the next morning he’d take out his notebook. And there would be written, in
his small neat hand, everything they had discussed, every conclusion they had come to, every course of action on which they had decided.
    And the habit hadn’t left him. He picked up the envelope on which he’d made notes, and his glass, then slid back the doors to the terrace. He stepped outside. The lights of the city
were a sparkling carpet below. The view at night always made him feel as if he was flying. He looked up at the sky. Even the competition from the lights below couldn’t dim the brilliance of
the Plough as it arched across the darkness. He lifted his glass and saluted. Its constancy made him feel secure and safe. He drained his glass and walked around the outside of the house. He could
smell cut grass from the heap in the far corner and the sweetness of the night-scented stock, which had self-seeded in all the beds. A legacy from Janey. Planted that first year they had moved
here. When she had been happy.
    He checked that the car was locked, then walked up the drive, pushed shut the heavy wooden gates and slotted the bolt into place. Towards the south, the bulk of Three Rock Mountain loomed in the
distance. Behind it was Kippure, and close by its eastern flank, Djouce Mountain. To the west of Kippure the lake at Blessington and the stone village of Ballyknockan and over the hills, over
Moanbane and Mullaghcleevaun and Duff Hill, and down into the valley with Fancy Mountain on one side and Djouce on the other, Lough Dubh where James de Paor had drowned twenty years ago, and where
his step-daughter Marina drowned too. One was an accident, the other suicide, so the newspapers said. He leaned against the gate. It was very quiet up here tonight. Hardly a sound, except his feet
on the tarmacadam of the drive and his breath. Sometimes the peace was shattered. Like that day on the lake. High summer, the graceful nineteenth-century house. James and Sally, their one-year-old
daughter, Vanessa. Dominic and his friends from school. And his step-brother and -sister, Marina and Tom. Swimming in the lake, sailing and fishing. Picnics in the woods that sloped down behind the
house to the water. Then one day the roar of a motorboat shattering the quiet. A group of kids, teenagers, had stolen it from its mooring. James and Marina had gone out in the dinghy to remonstrate
with them. But something went wrong. The outboard engine stalled. James had stood up to try to start it again as the motorboat careened by. The wash caused the dinghy to swing wildly from side to
side. James fell in. Marina tried to rescue him. But he drowned. A tragic accident. And then, twenty years later, another tragic accident. Another party in the house, this time given by Dominic de
Paor. The morning after, Marina could not be found. It was thought she had gone back to Dublin with some of the other guests. But her body was found trapped in the rocks where the small stream ran
from the upper lake into the lower. Blood tests showed she had drunk three-quarters of a bottle of vodka. There were also traces of cocaine. And one of the tabloids had got hold