“No, nothing like that,” Roly says with a smile. “I’m Detective Inspector Roland Byrne, with the Guards in Dublin. I don’t know if you remember, but I had a chat with you a good few years back now—twenty-three, actually—about an American girl named Erin Flaherty. We had a witness who saw you talking to her in the Raven in Dublin not long before she went missing.”
Deasey doesn’t say a word.
“Do you remember meeting her?”
“That was twenty-three years ago. I’ve chatted to a lot of people, men and women, in the last twenty-three years.”
He’s been looking at Roly, but suddenly he shifts his eyes to me and I can see him start. It’s very subtle, but I think he’s recognized me. He looks away quickly and says, to cover the awkwardness of the moment, “Can you give me a date at least? Perhaps I could check my calendar.”
“This would have been in the summer of 1993,” Roly says.
Deasey pretends to think, tapping an index finger against his forehead in a way that makes me want to haul off and punch him. “I don’t think so. Nope, I don’t remember that.”
“What about a German woman named Katerina Greiner?” Roly says it quietly, trying to catch him off guard.
He looks confused. “What?”
“Do you have any memory of meeting a German woman named Katerina Greiner, around 1992 or 1993?”
“No. I wouldn’t think so.” He looks confused. “You remember who you met twenty-three years ago, detective?”
“When was it you moved back to Arklow?”
“Three years ago. My ma was sick.”
“I’m sorry about your mother. That must have been tough,” I say. That gets him. He gulps and looks me right in the eyes, but doesn’t say anything.
“Where were you on May twenty-first and twenty-second?” Roly blurts out. I look over at him. He’s not supposed to be asking about Niamh.
“What, last week, like? Or back in 1993?”
“Last week?”
“Saturday? I was here, working on cars or out on calls. We’ll often get called out on Saturdays, tourists with car trouble, like. And then I was probably at the pub with my brother, Cathal. That’s where you’ll often find me.” He calls through to the back of the garage. “Cathal, come on out. We were at the pub, yeah? Saturday night last weekend?”
Cathal Deasey comes through, wiping his hands on a rag. “Yeah,” he says. “It was Petey’s daughter’s twenty-first, wasn’t it? We were all there most of the night. Anyone at the pub would tell you.”
Niall Deasey grins triumphantly.
“You finished?” he asks us. “Because if you are, I’d like you to get the fuck out of my garage.”
Roly walks right up to him, doesn’t touch him, but looks right into his eyes. “If you know anything that could help us find out what happened to Erin Flaherty, you better tell me, Niall lad. Because there is no shortage of paperwork on you back at my office and I can pull out any one of the fifty things I think you’ve done and I can work those cases until I get something that will stick. You hear me?”
Deasey draws himself up and I know he’s about an inch away from hitting Roly. I start to move forward but so does the brother.
“Niall,” Cathal says quietly.
Niall Deasey turns and holds his gaze for a minute and then shrugs. “Lookit. We met her at the Raven like you said. Wasn’t anything to it, really. Just a chat at the bar. She was a lovely girl. Had a bit of a flirt. Bought her a drink. We left and we never saw her again or heard anything about her until that one”—he doesn’t look over at me—“chatted up my little cousin John down the pub. I didn’t put it together, the resemblance, until she’d already been chatting with us for a bit. I remembered her, your cousin, because of the accent and because a few months later I saw the bit about her on the SixOne. But I don’t know anything about her. Okay?”
Roly stares at him for another long moment. I can smell the tension in the air, sweat and gasoline and metal.
“All right, then. You take care, Niall. We’ll be back to you soon.”
“That’s it? You’re not going to arrest me for doing fuck-all?”
“Not today. See ya.”
* * *
Roly waits until we’re in the car. “So?”
“Either he doesn’t know anything about Erin or he’s so sure we don’t have anything that he wasn’t thrown by us showing up unannounced.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” Roly says. “Something about him bothers me.”
“He recognized me, all right. I could see it immediately. So his pretending he didn’t at first was just posturing. He was keeping something from us, I’m just not sure what.”
Roly puts on the radio in the car and we listen to a breathless story about the searches ongoing at Robert Herricks’s house in Baltinglass. “The family of missing woman Niamh Horrigan waits as the searches continue,” the radio announcer says. I can tell it’s driving Roly crazy not to be there as things heat up.
“I can check that alibi anyway,” he says suddenly. “At the pub.”
“Yeah. He sounded pretty confident though. But he said he was out on calls during the day. Maybe he had a window in there?”
We’re back in Glenmalure by five. As we get out of the car, we can hear the distant chop-chop of a helicopter overhead. “Aerial searches,” Roly says.
Mrs. Curran’s house looks strangely desolate as we approach it in the dusky twilight. There’s a light on somewhere in the back, and the yellow glow of it illuminates the house in the darkness.
A small, pudgy man is standing in the doorway. He’s wearing sweatpants and a black T-shirt with purple writing on it. His hair is long and thin, gathered in a little ponytail that hangs over one shoulder.
We introduce ourselves and follow him into the house. It’s not until he’s under the light in the living room that I can see he’s dying, too. His skin is yellow, his eyes bloodshot, and what I took for pudginess is actually bloat. Liver? Kidneys? Hepatitis? Whatever it is, it’s bad.
I say, “Mr. Curran, you spoke to the police around the time of my cousin’s disappearance. You said you didn’t meet her and you didn’t know anything about what happened to her.”
He shuffles a bit farther into the room. “I guess. It was a long time ago. There’s another one now, in’t there? I saw it on the telly.”
“Here, can we go inside?” Roly asks.
We get settled in the sitting room. Mrs. Curran is on the couch and I can’t tell if she remembers us.
Roly asks Gary Curran, “Does the name Katerina Greiner mean anything to you?”
He shakes his head. “No, don’t think so.”
“Do you remember a German woman, a woman who had an accent, anything like that, around the time Erin Flaherty went missing.”
“No,” he says. But his eyes widen suddenly.
“What does the German woman have to do with it all?” Mrs. Curran asks. “What did she…?” She gasps then, and I see pain flash across her face.
“She needs to rest,” the nurse says, glaring at us. “I can give you something, Mrs. Curran.”