I go back to the other women who went missing in Ireland in 1993. There was a forty-year-old mother of six who disappeared from her home in Donegal, a couple of young girls who were reported missing but then found in County Cork. There’s a German backpacker who may have visited the monastery at Glendalough and a twenty-three-year-old woman who took a bus to Galway from her home in Wexford and never contacted her family. The Wexford woman and the German backpacker are the ones that have my attention. I write the names down—Louise Dooley and Katerina Greiner—and finish my coffee.
I’ve spent hours at home Googling the list of persons of interest in the original investigation, checking Facebook and LinkedIn, with nothing much to report. I let myself search for Conor and come up with all the same pages I’ve seen before, department information on Trinity’s website, announcements for his latest book about Ireland after World War II, a picture of him from the book jacket. The first time I saw it, late at night, a few Novembers ago, while Lilly slept inside and the water moved against the beach outside the windows, I almost gasped, seeing him after all these years, an older Conor, but recognizable.
I let myself stare at the photos from the launch party for the book at Trinity a couple of years ago. There’s a picture of a beautiful blond woman, dressed in a flowing yellow dress, a huge smile on her face as she poses next to older Conor. Dr. Kearney and Ms. Arpin, the caption reads. I let the little knife edge of pain slide underneath my skin for a moment and then I slam the laptop closed and get up to go.
St. Stephen’s Green is exactly as I remember it, flowering trees and hedges lining the walking paths, the pond placid and full of ducks. The park is only moderately full; I find a bench in the sun and I have it all to myself once a young woman with a stroller moves along, the toddler in the stroller shouting about the ducks as they go.
Every man who walks by could be Conor, but I get tired of the disappointment and I close my eyes and let the sun warm my face. I’m still jet-lagged and sleep deprived and for the first time since I arrived, I let myself relax a little, let go of the tension.
I must doze off for a minute but when I start awake, the voice is still clear in my mind. I was at the hotel in Glenmalure. Talking to the woman behind the bar. The Guards were in a few months ago asking about a German girl. I think they found her, though. They didn’t ask about your cousin.
A German girl.
Griz answers on the first ring, like she was waiting for a call.
“It’s Maggie D’arcy,” I say. “Roly told me he’d be in Wicklow all day but I thought I’d better tell someone. I just remembered something. There was a German girl. Back in 1993. The first time I went down there, the woman at the hotel mentioned that someone had been asking about her. She said they found her, but maybe she knows something. Maybe there was a mistake.” I don’t say anything about my archive search.
But Griz already knows about her. I can tell by the way she hesitates. “Thank you, Detective D’arcy. I’ll make sure we follow up. I’ll ring you if we need to ask you any more about it.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thank you.”
There’s a shout in the background. She’s not indoors. “I’ve to go,” she says. I recognize something about the quality of the noise behind her. She’s got a lot of people, a lot of cars around her.
“Has something happened?”
She hesitates. I can feel her wrestling with herself, trying to decide. I’ve been there. In the end, I’m a fellow cop.
“You’ll see it later on the telly,” she says, “if the number of cameras here is any indication. We found something.” She hesitates again. “We found something of Niamh’s.”
16
1993
After Bernie found the scrap of paper with the bus times at the bed-and-breakfast, Roly told me to sit tight and wait for word. “We’re following all the leads,” he said, distracted, “just making a courtesy call before heading off to Galway to check bus station security tapes. Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. It may be a couple of days.”
But I was still thinking about the bartender at the Raven. I went for a run in a little park further down Ringsend Road and then, wearing one of Erin’s cotton fisherman sweaters against the cold afternoon, I walked into Temple Bar. The streets were busier now at the end of the working day, buses pulling up along St. Stephen’s Green and commuters hurrying along to their homes, their faces cast down at the sidewalk. The air smelled deliciously of smoke and, though it wasn’t raining, the gray, metallic tang of rain.
At five fifteen, the pub was about twenty times as full as it had been before. I pushed my way up to the bar and looked for the redheaded barman. He wasn’t on duty—the older man with the moustache was holding court instead—and I was just about to go when I saw the redhead sitting at the end of the bar, a pint of Guinness in front of him. He was chatting with a very pretty blond woman who looked interested in whatever he was whispering in her ear, and he didn’t look like he wanted to be interrupted. I ordered a pint and took it down to his end of the bar anyway.
“Hi,” I said, leaning in and addressing him over the woman’s head. She looked up and smiled. My bartender friend didn’t smile. “I don’t know if you remember. But I was in yesterday and I thought that maybe you thought you recognized me. The thing is, it may have been my cousin. Or you may have thought I was my cousin, I mean. We look a lot alike. And I don’t know if you heard, but she’s missing. The Guards are looking for her and I came over from the States to help find her. If she came here a lot, you might have seen something or heard something that could help us find her.”
He stared at me for a minute and then muttered, “Jaysus.”
The woman was staring at me, too, and she put a hand to her chest. “Not the American girl who went missing down in Wicklow? It was on RTÉ this morning. You’re very like her, aren’t you? Sean, do you know her?”
“No, I don’t know her,” he said, in a resigned way. “Not really. But she used to stop in quite a bit and your man Andy fancied her, so sometimes I’d ring him up if she came in. It gave me a turn when I saw you. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, she’s come back. That’s grand, so.’ But then I realized you weren’t her. You’re very like her, but you’re … not her.”
“No,” I said. “Did she ever talk to you? Did you ever see her with anyone in here?”
He hesitated and then he said, “We just chitchatted a bit, if you know what I mean. At the bar, like, with Andy.” He pointed to a skinny, acne-plagued teenager behind the bar. “I knew she was American and all that. God, you look like her. I could have sworn it was her. Ah, yeah, we chatted sometimes, but not a lot.”
“Was she ever in here with anyone? A man?”
“No, she always came by herself. She mentioned getting off work a couple times, like, that it had been a long day or whatever at the café. She’d usually have one pint and look at a newspaper or just have a chat with whoever was around.”
“Did she ever meet anyone in here? Did guys bother her?”
He hesitated. “They always bothered her, but she didn’t let them bother her, if you know what I mean. She knew how to smile and chat for a minute and then move on if she wasn’t interested. Working as a barman, you see a lot of different sorts o’ brush-offs. She was a pro, she was.”