Strange Sally Diamond

Angela grinned, ‘We called them after our ex-husbands,’ and then they both laughed. I grinned too even though I thought it was a bit rude to their ex-husbands.

I was seven hours and fifteen minutes in the garda station. They took my photograph and fingerprints. They left me in a room by myself for the first forty-seven minutes and then two women came in, wearing suits, Detective Sergeant Catherine Mara and Detective Inspector Andrea Howard, shortly followed by a grumpy man who introduced himself as Geoff Barrington, my solicitor. Howard turned on a tape recorder and they introduced themselves for the tape. I didn’t want to look at them, so I looked at the wooden table and the scratches in it. Someone had engraved the word ‘cunt’ into the table in spiky capitals. That was an extremely rude word.

They asked me three times to tell the story of my dad’s death, and I got a bit annoyed at having to say the same thing over and over again. Geoff sighed deeply and said the best thing for me to do was to answer their questions. They asked me why I didn’t know that a domestic incinerator wouldn’t be hot enough to burn human remains. I shook my head. And they asked me to speak out loud for the record. I said I didn’t know because we burned everything else that wasn’t plastic.

Then they asked me about the letters and why I hadn’t read them. One of them laughed when I said I’d been considering waiting for my birthday. I got angry then. ‘Why are you laughing?’ I shouted. Geoff put his hand on my arm, and I shook it off.

‘Sally, do you wait for your birthday to open all of your mail?’

‘I don’t get any mail,’ I answered.

He scribbled in his notebook again and asked them to refrain from laughing as it triggered his client. I stared at him then. He looked as tired as I felt.

Mara asked me my date of birth even though I’d been asked that twice already. They asked me about my real date of birth, and I wasn’t sure what they meant. Then they asked me about my adoption and if I knew who my birth parents were and I was surprised because I didn’t understand how this was relevant. I told them that Mum and Dad had adopted me from an agency when I was six years old and that I knew nothing about my birth parents. They asked me what my earliest memories were and I told them that it was when I blew out candles on my seventh birthday. They asked in several different ways if I remembered anything before that and I said no, and then they asked me to try to remember and I told them that my dad had always told me that I didn’t have to remember things I didn’t want to.

‘But,’ said Howard, ‘you must remember something from early childhood?’ I shook my head. They asked me to speak out loud for the record. ‘I don’t remember anything before my seventh birthday,’ I said. Geoff asked to speak to them outside the room.

Shortly after that, Angela came in with a burger and chips from Supermacs. Another guard stood in the corner of the room. I offered him some chips but he refused. ‘You’re all right,’ he said. I liked him. He looked a little bit like Harrison Ford when he was young. I would have liked to talk to him. But he went back to saying nothing, and looking at his shoes. I look at my shoes when I’m uncomfortable too.

Angela told me that the police would be at my house for a few more days and that I might be charged with a crime.

‘What crime?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer. ‘Let Geoff do his job. Honestly, he has your best interests at heart.’

8

I spent five nights in Nadine and Angela’s house. Geoff talked mostly to Angela and ignored me, which most of the time suited me, but all the time, they were talking about me. Angela would check occasionally that I understood what was being said, but he didn’t address anything to me, except the last time when we were in his office in Roscommon town, and he tried to shake my hand as he said goodbye, and I snapped mine away. It’s easier to look at someone when they’re not looking at you. He was handsome and I suppose he did his job properly because he said that the charges of Illegal Disposal of Human Remains would most likely be dropped under the circumstances. Angela said it was because of my condition.

Geoff and Angela agreed that it would not be lawfully possible for her to become my legal guardian or me to be made a ward of court as I was an adult and I had nearly always made my own decisions, even if some of them were ‘misguided’. But Geoff said it might be a condition of the court that if I had a serious dilemma in the future I would ask Angela or a guard. Like, for example, if I ever thought of incinerating a body again, Angela would assess the situation and tell me what to do. I thought that wasn’t a good example to give. I was hardly going to endure this kind of fuss again.