Our conversation slows and I fall asleep for a bit. When I sit up we’re already well south of Dublin, into green fields and sheep. I feel something wash over me, despite everything. Awe. It’s so beautiful here, it fills me up with a kind of glorious recognition. Ireland.
“Good kip?”
“Mmmm.” I take a long sip of the coffee Roly got me, rub my eyes and fix my seat.
“Okay,” I tell him. “I’m awake now. What can you tell me about Niamh Horrigan without putting yourself in the shit?”
He looks over at me and winks. “The family rang up the local lads in Galway Monday morning. Niamh Horrigan, age twenty-five. She’s a teacher at a school there. She had planned to walk part of the Wicklow Way at the weekend. She was staying at the youth hostel in Glendalough, and on Saturday morning she woke up and left early. They think she was going to try to walk to Glenmalure as she was booked at the hostel there for Saturday night. Then she was to take the bus from Roundwood back home. Her family expected her home Sunday evening, started ringing her mobile. She didn’t answer. When she wasn’t home by Monday morning, they got the Guards involved.”
“Phone?” I ask.
“It’s not pinging, wherever it is. Could be the battery died, could be someone switched it off. You know yourself. Anyway, so, they were out looking for her, with the dogs, and they found the scarf. I’ll show you on the map when we get there. It’s fairly far away from where you found the necklace, up in the trees. As I told you, one of the lads remembered the description and they rang me up. Techs started excavating the site yesterday.” I try to figure out what he’s not saying. My instinct tells me that Roly’s urgency yesterday means there’s something else.
“Bad luck about the phone. Anything else? Is the bed-and-breakfast still there?”
“Your woman’s not running it as one anymore, but the local lads made sure Niamh hadn’t been there. I’ve a bad feeling, D’arcy. As for the excavation around where they found the scarf, it may be a few days. They have to do it very carefully. If there are remains, they don’t want to disturb the evidence. Ah, you know all that shite.”
I look out the window for a long moment. “Remind me about McKenny and Talbot.”
“All right. This has all been in the papers. My team had taken a look at the cases a couple years ago, even recommended to the local lads they interview some witnesses again. But there wasn’t really anything to go on. Teresa McKenny, twenty-two when she disappeared while walking from Aughrim to her job at the golf course in Macreddin Village in June of 1998. Tiny little places, so they are. Normally her brother drove her but his car was knackered and so she set off walking. She never made it. Two weeks to the day after she was last seen, her body was found by a farmer in a streambed in some foothills about fifteen kilometers away. She’d only been dead a day, from blunt force trauma to her skull. She’d been raped. Repeatedly. But the fella who did it must have used a johnny. Condom. There was nothing for the techs to look at. The stream was full from recent rain and washed away any trace evidence.
“Then June Talbot in 2006. She was English, thirty when she disappeared. She’d been over here for a few years, living with her Irish boyfriend in Cork and working as an early childhood teacher at a crèche in Frankfield. Her friends said the relationship wasn’t going too well. Maybe she had a fella on the side, but no one knew or would say for sure. She went on a bit of a walkabout, just to think things over. Boyfriend swore he didn’t know she wasn’t planning on coming home, but she checked herself into a guesthouse near Baltinglass for a couple of nights and told the woman who owned the guesthouse that she was going walking at Baltinglass Abbey.
“It took them a while to figure out she was actually missing, but two weeks after the last time she was seen, her body was found in the river Slaney by a woman walking her dog. Same details as McKenny. Blunt force trauma, sexual assault, no evidence to speak of. They looked at the boyfriend but he was well alibied and … that was it. As you know, since McKenny went missing in 1998 we’ve considered your … Erin’s case a possible link with them, but the fact that her body was never found … Maybe now we’ll have something. I’m awfully sorry to get you over here under these circumstances, D’arcy.”
I push the emotion down. Not now. “I know. Tell me more about Niamh Horrigan.”
“Lovely girl, everyone adored her. Excellent teacher, nice to her granny. Wasn’t seeing any particular fella but she wasn’t against the odd shag now and again, I’d say. That’s the feeling I get. They’re looking there, of course. She was an experienced mountaineer and hillwalker. One of her friends said she could take care of herself, had in fact once fought off a pervert when she was walking in Killarney. We’ll get some more about that now. But that’s it. Nothing to suggest she was going to take off.” He looks over at me. “She bred Angora rabbits.”
“Rabbits?”
“Rabbits.”
“She went missing Saturday?”
“Yeah.” Today’s Thursday. Five days.
We drive in silence. The landscape is familiar but new, too, greener and fresher and wetter than I remember.
“Ah, it’s a lovely day now,” Roly says.
It is. The hills are purple and green, bright yellow gorse blooming all along the road. I open my window and breathe in the cool, fragrant air.
We’re in Laragh by eleven and Roly turns left and then hangs right to stay on the old Military Road.
“It hasn’t changed a bit,” I say as we climb past little cottages and fields of white sheep, then start down the other side into the Glenmalure Valley.
“Some parts of Wicklow have,” he says. “But you’re right. It’s a bit remote for commuting, I suppose. The trees have probably grown up.” The plantations on either side of the road seem to have expanded. The hillsides are greeny black with conifers.
They’ve set up a staging area in a little parking area and clearing off the old Military Road. I can see the uniformed guards moving around in their reflective vests and the white vans that likely belong to the crime scene processors. “It’s Coillte property,” Roly says. Queel-cha. “The state forestry service. There’s a track that goes up through the forest not far from where the scarf was found but they’ll still be walking for a bit.”
The detective in me recoils at the task they’ve got up here. From an evidence preservation standpoint, this is a nightmare. The wind, the weather, the inaccessibility. They may have to come in with helicopters if they find anything, depending on where they find it.
I walk back toward the road, away from the marked cars and crime scene vans, and stand there for a moment looking back across the valley. In my memories of this place, the hills are socked in, obscured by clouds, the air cold and heavy with rain. But today the sun is shining over the valley, the greens are brilliantly green, the purply browns rich and dark. It’s beautiful and wild. The wind moves across the near-distant mountains. I think about the search for Niamh Horrigan. The search for Erin. It seems impossible you could find one woman in all this vastness.
Tell us, Erin. Tell us who. But the only sound is the wind through the trees. The long sweep of golden grass by the road, edged by the rows of conifers, the bright blue sky and smudgy clouds, everything is rich and strong and brilliant.