“We were hoping to speak to Mr. O’Hanrahan?” Roly says, showing his warrant card.
“If you want.” She rolls her eyes, goes to the bottom of the wide, metal staircase, and calls up, “There’s some guards here to see you!”
She turns around and stares at me, barely disguised resentment on her face.
We look up to find him coming down to meet us. Hacky O’Hanrahan has put on weight in twenty-three years, too much of it in his face. He’s jowly and pink, his eyes bloodshot and shifty.
When he sees me, he stops, looking startled.
“Hello, Mr. O’Hanrahan,” Roly says. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I spoke to you when we were investigating the disappearance of Erin Flaherty, back in the nineties.”
“Yes, yes, I … do remember.” His eyes keep darting over to me.
Roly says, “Could we sit down and chat for a bit?”
The woman, who I assume is Mrs. O’Hanrahan, looks positively gleeful. “Of course,” she says. “Come in and sit down.”
O’Hanrahan glares at her, but he leads the way into a pale, elegantly decorated room at the front of the house. The view of the Irish Sea through the huge windows is distracting. It’s like there’s a beautiful woman sitting in the room and no one can look away.
He sits forward in his chair, ready to jump up.
“This is Detective Maggie D’arcy,” Roly says finally. “You may remember her as well.”
“Yes, yes. Of course.” He crosses his legs, then uncrosses them and leans back in his chair.
“We’re going back over our investigation,” Roly says, “and we just wanted to confirm a few things with you. You told us you met Miss Flaherty just the once and that you had no further contact with her after that. Is that correct?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right.”
I pick up the questions. “Though you did call her … ring her, I mean. To see if she wanted to join you and your friends for a drink.”
“Well, maybe. I really don’t remember. It was so long ago now.” His wife coughs and he starts.
“Did my cousin say anything to you that could have indicated she was in trouble, that she was afraid of someone?”
“I hardly knew her. We didn’t do a lot of talking.”
“Just think. It could be very important.”
“No, nothing like that. It was just … I did that a thousand times when I was that age. Meeting someone out at a club. You like the look of each other. You go home. That’s it.”
“Except that wasn’t it. You called her. Rang her. You asked if she wanted to meet you and your friends at O’Brien’s.”
He hesitates, then says, “She didn’t seem scared of anyone. As far as I remember, she seemed pretty fucking confident.” He fiddles with the hem of his pants. “But then later, I don’t know, she seemed sad. She was crying and … it was weird. I thought we’d been having fun and then she kind of freaked out. She was sobbing and trying to hurt herself. I didn’t know what to do.”
Roly and I look at each other. “Trying to hurt herself?”
“She was like, pulling at her hair, like she was trying to pull it out.”
Suddenly, I remember Erin crying, pulling at her hair. I’m sorry, Mags. I’m sorry. If I can just—When was that? Why was she crying? The memory unnerves me. I have no context for it. It just comes out of nowhere.
Roly says, “Why didn’t you tell the Guards that?”
O’Hanrahan’s wife is pacing around the room, picking things up and putting them back down. He carefully places his hands on his thighs, then turns and snaps, “Would you stop walking around? Go get me a Bushmills, if you would.”
“Get your own fucking Bushmills,” she says. We listen to her clatter up the staircase in her high heels.
“Sorry,” O’Hanrahan says. “I was … I didn’t think it mattered. I guess I was embarrassed. I didn’t want people to think it was, you know, because of me.” He’s lying, but he’s embarrassed too, I think.
“What else?” Roly asks.
“My family thought … Well, I received legal advice that it might make it look like something had happened when we were together. I was counseled not to say anything about it. My father was … his businesses. He was concerned about his reputation. Our reputation.” He’s very nervous now, his hands tapping out a fast rhythm on his knee.
“Is that why your father had me followed?” I ask him. “Because he was concerned about his reputation?”
I can feel Roly’s surprise. He didn’t know I was going to ask that. When O’Hanrahan looks up, there’s genuine surprise on his face, too. “Did he?”
“That day that I waited for you outside your apartment. After that, you told him my name and you told him I’d been asking questions. He had me trailed.”
“He thought you were going to try to get me up on charges or something,” he says. “I didn’t know he had you followed. He was probably just protecting me.” He stands up. “I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you,” he says. When I look up at him, he’s pale in the sunlight coming through the windows. “If you need more information, you’ll have to speak to my solicitor.”
“Okay, Mr. O’Hanrahan. We’ll leave you alone now. You’ll be hearing from us if there’s anything else.”
I see the wife watching from an upstairs window when we leave the house.
We stop and look at the view one more time before we get into the car. The sea reflects the sun; the water is full of diamonds. “That’s the thing about Ireland,” Roly says finally. “One minute it seems like the arse-ugliest spot on the earth, and the next it’s the most beautiful fucking thing you’ve ever seen.”
40
TUESDAY, JUNE 7,
2016
In a coffee shop in Bray, Roly and I check the online sites for the Irish Times and the Independent. There’s no real news about Robert Herricks, but Stephen Hines and the other reporters stretch it out as much as they can. The Guards are searching properties in Wicklow that Herricks has been associated with over the years. I imagine them approaching sheds and barns and basements, hesitating every time. This could be it. This could be the one.
Niamh.
She’s been gone seventeen days.
“What was that about the fella following you?” Roly asks.
“I told you that, back then. I confronted him with a screwdriver.”
“Ah, yeah. I thought you were mad, you know. I thought you were making that up.”
“Well, I was a bit mad by then. But listen, I just realized. Something about O’Hanrahan made me think of it. Remember I told you that John White looked familiar to me when I first met him? I was asking you about him? Well, I’m ninety-nine percent sure he’s the guy who followed me.”
He’d ordered himself a fancy-looking pastry with lots of frosting and a cherry on the top. He stops demolishing it for a minute and looks up at me. “Are you saying O’Hanrahan hired Johnny White before Johnny White was a guard?”
“I don’t know, but I’d swear in court it was him.”