I turn to Erin.
It’s all here, a record of those two months of my life. The initial interview that Emer and Daisy and I gave at the Irishtown Garda Station, the interviews with neighbors and the other workers at the café.
The first thing I notice is how much of it there is. They were working it all along. What felt like inaction was just withholding of information. As soon as the report was made, the Gardaí in Wicklow had started canvassing, interviewing bus drivers, checking all the bed-and-breakfasts in Glendalough and Glenmalure. They’d discovered Mrs. Curran almost immediately.
The first interview with Conor Kearney took place the same day I reported Erin missing. They seemed to be looking at him fairly seriously—a couple of subsequent interviews with him, interviews with his known associates—until they interviewed Bláithín Arpin and she told them that he’d been with her at her parents’ holiday house in someplace called Brittas Bay the weekend of the sixteenth. Additionally, every single friend of his said he had never shown any signs of violence or aggression, that he was one of the kindest people they knew. A friend from his graduate program said he knew that Bláithín hadn’t liked Conor’s friendship with Erin, but that he didn’t think there was anything more in it than Conor feeling protective of Erin. “I always thought it was more a little sister sort of relationship than anything,” he’d told Roly and Bernie. “He seemed to worry about her.”
Back then, no one had told me Conor had a solid alibi for that weekend, and it makes sense all of a sudden that they turned away from him, especially once they knew Erin had gone back to Dublin. They’d clearly started looking elsewhere.
The other surprising thing to me is how seriously they seemed to be considering Gary Curran as a suspect. As they’d mentioned, he’d been cautioned for stalking a fellow UCD student a few years before Erin’s disappearance. The picture I get, though, is of a socially inept teenager with a desperate crush on a girl who became increasingly alarmed by his behavior. In their interview with him, he said he hadn’t met Erin because he’d been doing errands in Wicklow when she arrived at the bed-and-breakfast and then was off to work again by the time she left the next morning.
“Did you all look at Gary Curran again as part of the review?” I ask Griz.
“Yeah, but he’s been out of the country for most of the last twenty years,” she says. “It seems like they were looking at him for Erin initially, but not once their focus shifted back to Dublin, and he wasn’t really in the picture for any of the other disappearances. That’s my sense of it, like.”
Still, he and his mother were perhaps nearly the last people to see Erin, and they’re right there in Glenmalure. If I were in charge, I’d want to talk to him again.
After I told them about Hacky O’Hanrahan, they had gone and interviewed him at his parents’ house. The report lists the house name and address: Bridgehampton, Killiney Hill Road, Killiney.
The parents seem to have controlled the interview fairly tightly but Hacky O’Hanrahan had told Roly and Bernie the same things he’d told me, that he and Erin had met at a club and gone back to his flat in Merrion Square. She’d left in the morning and he’d never seen her again. That must have been before they started recording interviews, because instead of a transcript it’s a signed statement.
She seemed like a girl who wanted to have a good time. She was a nice girl. But she was the one who said she wanted to come home with me. She seemed pretty happy, if you want to know the truth. She said to ring her so I did. But she didn’t ring back and I left it. I didn’t even think of her again until I saw the thing on the SixOne.
Reading between the lines, I can tell that they thought he was an asshole. But there isn’t anything more incriminating than that.
I turn to Niall Deasey.
Roly and Bernie had gotten the Murphy brothers’ names from the Westbury and run them through the system. I remember the conference room, Wilcox’s gaze on me as I said I’d never heard their names. He’d probably thought I was in on whatever it was Erin had been involved with. I read the detectives’ statements, laying out an incomplete profile of the brothers.
They had been born in 1940 and 1945, respectively, and after a middle-class Irish American childhood with four other siblings in Somerville, Massachusetts, they’d started a cement company that had been very successful, mostly by obtaining contracts with the city of Boston and other municipalities in the suburbs. The Murphys had been active in raising money for IAFNI, the Northern Ireland aid organization I’d learned about from Ingrid, in the ’80s and early ’90s, and there was a note that the US Department of Justice knew about them because of it. Whatever they were up to then, they’re both dead now, one from lymphoma and the other from a classic widowmaker heart attack while eating at a Boston steakhouse.
It still isn’t clear, though, exactly why they were flagged in the system.
And it leaves unanswered another question: Who was the guy from the North?
On to Niall Deasey. It’s all the stuff Bernie and Roly told me. He owned a local auto garage in Arklow and, the Arklow cop told them, he probably dealt drugs and, in his younger years, did a little armed robbery here and there. His father, Petey Deasey, had been a known republican but Niall Deasey, in the ’80s and ’90s, was known to have associations in criminal enterprises in Wicklow and Dublin that had connections to dissident republican groups claiming to be fighting the drugs trade. But after 1998, he seemed to fall off the radar a bit, and at some point there was a note that he’d moved to London to run a garage with his half-brother. He seemed to have stayed out of trouble since then, and in 2013, when his mother became ill, he moved back to Arklow and reopened the garage. Back in 1993, a local cop had a chat with him and asked him about the Americans. He claimed that the American men were over as part of some conference for breeders of boxers. He’d corresponded with them before the conference and taken them out for pints when they’d arrived. It didn’t seem like anyone had believed that story, though.
That’s it. I Google Drumkee and read some more Irish Times stories about arms dumps in Wicklow and Carlow and about Kevin Whelan and the graves of other victims of the loyalist and republican paramilitary organizations. There’s something knocking around in my head, something about Katerina Greiner and Erin and what they were doing in the forest in Wicklow, but I can’t find it: It’s like a marble that keeps rolling just out of reach.
Griz is still working the missing persons cases, to see if she can identify any other possible victims. Now that we know he buried Katerina Greiner, it opens up the possibility that there are undiscovered victims.
She shows me a huge stack of sheets printed from the database: missing men and women of all ages. Before 1990 the names are mostly Irish ones, but starting around 2000 there are Polish and Bulgarian names and then, more recently, Chinese and Nigerian ones.
“A lot of these probably went home, but it’s a lot,” Griz says. “What I wanted to ask you, though, is if you have any ideas about Brenda Donaghy. I’ve started looking a bit but I can’t find any evidence she returned to Ireland. I talked to all the Donaghys in Dublin, which is a lot, but no one’s missing a daughter of the right age.”