Those We Left Behind Read Online Free

the blood still dried on his palms, Flanagan felt a piercing sorrow for this boy.
    She did the only sane and reasonable thing she could imagine: she dropped the plastic tube and put her arms around Ciaran, gathered him in close to her. Rocked him as his tears soaked through her jacket.
    Dear God and Jesus help him, she thought.
    An hour later, in a cold interview room, Flanagan sat opposite Ciaran and a social worker. Michael Garvey wasn’t the brothers’ case worker; rather he had the misfortune to be on call for out of hours duty. Flanagan had sat at an interview table with him many times before, but never for anything like this. Garvey looked pale and uneasy. She couldn’t blame him.
    Flanagan composed herself and arranged her notes on the table. No sooner had she released the boy from her embrace than she regretted the impropriety of it. She instructed herself to firm up, remember the victim, not to let her empathy cloud her judgement. This interview was the First Account. No time to be distracted.
    She studied the boy for a moment. Ciaran Devine, only twelve years old. Father killed in a hit-and-run by a joyrider just yards from the family home when Ciaran was four years old. His mother had died five years ago from heart failure caused by endocarditis, not uncommon among heroin users. She’d lost custody of her boys eighteen months before that, mental health issues compounded by drug and alcohol abuse. The brothers had been shunted around the care system ever since, had nobody but each other.
    A shitty start to life, Flanagan thought, but no excuse.
    She and the social worker went through the ritual of opening sealed cases, examining blank CDRs, before she inserted them into the audio recorder. She cautioned the boy, and Garvey double-checked that he understood.
    Then Flanagan began.
    ‘Ciaran, do you understand where you are?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, the word no more than an expulsion of air.
    ‘The detained person has replied in the affirmative,’ Flanagan said. ‘Try to speak up, Ciaran, so the microphone can hear you. It’s important. So where are you?’
    ‘The police station.’
    ‘Yes. The Serious Crime Suite at Antrim Police Station. How old are you?’
    ‘Twelve,’ he said.
    ‘And what is your brother’s name?’
    Ciaran hesitated. He knew she was aware of the answer. But he couldn’t know about cognitive interviewing, the information funnel, the art of beginning with vague, open questions, narrowing down over time to the hard root of truth.
    ‘Your brother’s name, Ciaran,’ she said.
    ‘Thomas.’
    ‘How old is he?’
    ‘Fourteen,’ Ciaran said. ‘He’ll be fifteen in May. He didn’t do it. It was me.’
    Flanagan inhaled. Garvey put his hand on Ciaran’s thin arm.
    She gave the boy a smile she intended to be reassuring, but it felt tight on her lips. ‘We’ll come to what happened to Mr Rolston in a while. Right now, we need to—’
    ‘Thomas didn’t have anything to do with it,’ Ciaran said, his voice rising. ‘It was me on my own.’
    Flanagan looked to Garvey. He stared back at her, his eyes wide. He turned to the boy and said, ‘Ciaran, you’re entitled to have a lawyer here. Do you want me to get one for you?’
    Ciaran did not react to the words, as if they were spoken to some other boy in some other room.
    Flanagan leaned forward. ‘Ciaran, I want you to think very carefully about what you’ve just said. It’s very important that you tell the truth. Even if what you said is true, Thomas was still there with you when it happened. He’ll still be in trouble for it. You won’t spare him anything by lying about it.’
    ‘He was there in the room,’ Ciaran said, staring at his hands. ‘But he didn’t do it. It was all me.’
    ‘Ciaran, I saw the blood on Thomas’s clothes. He was as covered in it as you were. You’ll not convince anyone he wasn’t at least alongside you when it happened. But now’s not the time to—’
    Ciaran looked up at her, and she