were at the same gathering. Eagan was okay. We could have been friends if our parents had got on better.”
“I liked Eagan,” Ru said. “We used to pretend we were twins. Little did I know… Anyway, Uncle Felan sat me down and told me Dad had killed Mum, then killed himself.”
Ink gaped at him. “What? And you believed him?”
“Not at first, but Auntie Nessa was sobbing and you know Dad had a temper. We’d both seen him hit Mum. Uncle Felan said it had been an accident, a push that made her fall and bang her head on the table. Dad had sliced down both his arms and bled to death beside her. The police had called Uncle Felan, asked him to get us from school and look after us. He told me he had Bela. I pressed him about you, but I was so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open, let alone string a sentence together.”
“You were drugged,” Ink said.
“Yes. Later, when I saw the medication Auntie Nessa was on, I guessed I’d been given that. I came around to find myself in bed, wearing Spiderman pyjamas. Not mine. The inside of my elbow was itching and when I looked at it, it was bruised. I know now that they took my blood.”
Ink was frantically trying to make sense of it all. How could his father have identified Eagan as Ruari?
“Auntie Nessa called me Eagan,” his brother whispered. “I was sick. Well, I thought I was sick, but it was them who were making me sick. I asked for you and they said you were in the hospital with the same as whatever was the matter with me, but you were worse. Bela was in a cage in my room and they wouldn’t take the padlock off and let her out. They fed her and gave her water, but I think they worried she might give them away. Well, later I thought that.
“They took me to Ireland on the ferry, went over with the Land Rover and the mobile home. I was hardly conscious. I suppose they claimed I was asleep. They used Eagan’s passport. I saw it later. They got away with kidnapping me. And Bela. They got away with a lot.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tay muttered.
“We went to live on a farm. It was out in the middle of nowhere. And then they allowed me to let Bela fly.” He stroked her stomach with his finger. “She’d never leave me. I won’t leave her.”
Ink was spellbound. He was hardly aware he was breathing. Shock had immobilised him.
“I wasn’t allowed to go to school. I was made to learn Gaelic. That was all that was spoken in the house for a long while. If I spoke English, I was punished. Then once I could speak Gaelic well enough, the three of us spoke a mixture of that and English. Auntie Nessa taught me as if I was at school—when she was okay. If she wasn’t, I kept out of her way. There was no TV, no computer, no landline, but plenty of books and games. Our uncle had a mobile phone which was always locked. But who did I have to call? I thought our parents were dead, and then they told me you were too.”
“And you believed them?” Ink couldn’t hold back the snap.
“I was eight years old,” Ru replied gently. “What was I supposed to think?”
“Did you wonder why Eagan wasn’t with them?”
“They told me he’d died a couple of months before. At that point, I believed them. It wasn’t as if we saw much of them, not the way Dad and his brother were. A long time later, Uncle Felan told me the truth. Some of it. Auntie Nessa had hit Eagan on the head while she was having one of her manic episodes. She was convinced he wasn’t dead. Uncle Felan wasn’t prepared to lose her, so he didn’t phone the police. He put her to bed, gave her a strong sedative and somehow came up with the idea that he could put things right by trapping Bela, then kidnapping me.”
“How did he know when to get you from school? We always came home together.”
“I think he was lucky that day. He came to the school and told me he was going to give up when he saw you with me, but when you ran back into the building, he took his chance. A way to hide that his wife had killed his son,