‘WHEN DETECTIVE O’CONNOR LEFT ME TO HELP KATE and her son, I slipped away unnoticed. During the mayhem, everyone thought I was with someone else. It was a risk, going to the caravan park. There was no guarantee that Ollie Gilmartin would still have his gun.’
‘How did you know he had one?’
‘I couldn’t be sure, Dr Ebbs, that he still had it, but I remembered the night he caught me sneaking out of the caravan. I was trying to get to Andrew. I think Gilmartin was out poaching.’
‘The night before the fire?’
‘No, no, it was a couple of nights before that. I recognised the type of gun, a Lanber. He was all mouth about it, talking about its reliability or some such nonsense. He was trying to distract me from asking too many questions. I guess I was doing the same thing.’
‘I see.’
‘His place wasn’t far, positioned right at the front of the caravan site. I had only been there once, with Joe. It’s funny the things you remember.’
‘So what happened when you got there?’
‘I can still see myself walking towards it, then thumping the front window of his caravan, hard, the noise reverberating, as if it was knocking on the doors of memory. I stood back when he opened the door. I watched him walk down the steps from his caravan, wanting to get a handle on what was going on. The police cars and officers at the amusement arcade hadn’t made a sound, but when he stood forward, he could see their blue lights flashing behind me.’
‘You were calm during all this, Ellie?’
‘Fifteen years is a long time to wait, Dr Ebbs. At first, when he saw it was me, Gilmartin looked like he’d seen a real ghost. He was speechless. But I could tell his curiosity was aroused when he noticed the squad cars in the distance. It didn’t take a lot to get him going. Even if I hadn’t told him the police wanted him, he’d have looked for any excuse to hightail it out of there.’
‘Away from you?’
‘Yes. I recognised the guilt on his face. The truth isn’t an easy thing to handle. I know that more than anyone. A guilty conscience, Dr Ebbs, is a mighty powerful thing.’
‘What did you say to him exactly?’
‘Not a lot.’
Dr Ebbs looks surprised.
‘He went to go back inside, to grab his coat or whatever, but I stopped him. I told him he needed to hurry, that Detective O’Connor wanted him now. They had Cronly. He had to hurry. He was hardly going to argue with me.’
‘So you went inside his caravan?’
‘Memory, Dr Ebbs, it’s a strange thing, isn’t it?’
‘I guess it is, Ellie.’
‘When I stepped inside that caravan, it was like I was back to the day I stood there with Joe, Amy waiting for us outside in the car. Gilmartin, he had a small plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. It had caught my eye that first day, sitting on top of a black leather Bible. They were both still there, in exactly the same spot. Incredible, isn’t it, Dr Ebbs, how some people are such creatures of habit?’
‘So you looked for his gun?’
‘I ransacked the place, found his tools in the corner. There was a locked cabinet, a makeshift thing, barely keeping itself together. I used his crowbar to prise it open.’
‘And the bullets?’
‘They were in a cardboard box in the kitchen drawer, handy in case of unwanted visitors.’ I let out a short laugh. I can tell Dr Ebbs isn’t amused, but he doesn’t interrupt.
‘I broke open the barrel of the Lanber, put in two cartridges, closed the gun, pulled the safety button back, the way my father had shown me, ready to take aim. I was more sure about what I was about to do than I had been about anything in my entire life.’
‘Go on, Ellie.’
‘I walked back to the amusement arcade. It wasn’t far. When I got there, one of the detectives had William Cronly. There was blood on his neck, and his hands were cuffed at the front.’
‘You fired?’
‘Yes. I felt the gun bolt, jolting me, the sound of both bullets, louder than anything I had ever heard.’
‘So what stopped you, Ellie?’
‘What stopped me shooting William Cronly?’
‘Yes.’
‘When I looked at him, Dr Ebbs, I believed I would kill him. The choice, at long last, was mine to make. For what it’s worth, after I called out his name, before I pulled back the trigger, when he stared back at me, I think he knew exactly who I was.’
‘But you fired the bullets into the air instead?’
‘I used to think, Dr Ebbs, that the hardest thing about loss was the remembering, because within it, the true enormity of things becomes fully realised. It is strange the way the mind can trick you into believing one thing. To be so sure of something, you never doubt it. You keep failing to ask the right questions. The truth hides, you see. It can stay hidden from you for a very long time, if you let it. I know I did. Right up until the moment I realised I needed to grasp the one thing I was trying hardest to run away from.’