The screen cuts to a shot of the reporter standing in front of a small house that I assume belongs to Robert Herricks. “Gardaí will continue to search for Niamh, and her family will continue to wait and hope.”
Who?
Who was the man on the trail?
Who?
“Whoever the man was, he must have killed Katerina Greiner,” Roly says. “Do you realize how close Gary Curran was to witnessing the murder?”
“And he may have killed Erin, too,” I say. “It was someone she knew, and it sounds like she wasn’t expecting to see him on the trail.”
“Except she was back in Dublin on the eighteenth,” he says.
He’s right. I’d forgotten. I can feel everything in me resisting the thought. She was back in Dublin on the eighteenth.
Roly’s looking at me, not quite meeting my eyes.
“Let’s start with who the man was. Who knew she was going down to Glenmalure?”
I say it before he can. “Conor, if she told him.”
“But we don’t know if she did.”
I keep going. “Emer said she didn’t tell her and Daisy.” I tell him about my coffee with Emer. “I don’t think they were hiding anything else. If she was in touch with Niall Deasey, then Deasey knew. And if she was in touch with Hacky O’Hanrahan, then he knew. Really, anyone who she might have told. The bus driver knew where she was going, obviously.”
“Okay,” Roly says slowly. “Okay. Let’s think this through. According to Gary Curran, she left the bed-and-breakfast and she walked toward the lodge. The bus came in but she didn’t get on it. Instead, she kept walking up the Military Road and onto the Wicklow Way.”
I drain the hot whiskey I ordered and let it seep in, slowing my heart rate. There’s something banging at my memory, something I missed; it’s there, but not quite there. I close my eyes. When I open them, Roly’s watching me. “That sounds like she was meeting this guy, whoever he is, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Roly drains his drink.
“Roly, let’s say something happened on the trail. The guy kills Katerina Greiner and then he forces Erin to go back to Dublin with him and get money and they flee … somewhere.”
“But then it’s some guy we don’t know anything about. Because there’s no missing guy.” He’s antsy, snapping at me. I can feel the weight of the days on us. Seventeen days.
Our food comes—fish and chips for Roly and potato-leek soup with salmon and brown bread for me.
“What are you going to do about Conor?” he asks me while we eat quickly, barely tasting the food.
“I don’t know. He lied to me. All this time he was lying.”
Roly takes a long drink, avoiding my eyes. Then he says, “You don’t … you don’t think it was him, do you? Does that mean anything to ya? The brown jacket, like?”
“The man on the trail? I don’t know. Conor had a motorcycle jacket, brown leather. Back … then. But he had an alibi.”
Roly doesn’t say anything.
I say, “His girlfriend, the woman he married was his alibi. She may have lied to protect him.”
“Yeah, but.”
“Right,” I say. I get up to use the restroom and on the way back, I stop to look at the walls in the hotel’s lounge area. The red-and-white wallpaper is covered with historical memorabilia and information about important Wicklow sites in the 1798 rebellion. There’s something about Cullen’s Rock, near Glenmalure, where there was a famous battle and where the rebels holed up in the mountains in 1798 and were later hanged.
“Roly,” I say when I get back to the table, “I was just thinking about what Bernie asked us. Why did Erin go to the mountains? The mountains. I was thinking. Bernie once told me a story about Petey Deasey holing up in a cottage near Glenmalure or something? Am I making that up?”
Roly looks surprised. “Petey Deasey … Yeah. That’s ringing the old bell. What was it? They were using a cottage down here as a place to stash arms. There was some kind of standoff. Bernie found out about it. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “If he has a house down here we don’t know about and they never searched it … Maybe Erin was staying there, maybe they were somewhere else and then came back and…” I can’t make the pieces fit, though. “Maybe the other women … I don’t know. When Griz and I were looking over everything, that was the thing that struck me. The mountains. They’re important to this guy somehow.”
Roly’s eyes are alive. His brain is already moving on this. “I don’t know where the place is. I need to get someone to look it up for me,” he says quietly.
“What about Wilcox?”
“Fuck Wilcox.” He thinks for a minute and then he takes out his phone and presses something. “Griz?” he says. “I need to ask you to do something for me. Fair warning, Wilcox won’t like it.” He listens for a minute and then he says, “Yeah, I need the location and anything you’ve got on a cottage down here where there was a standoff between Petey Deasey and the Guards. This would have been in 1967. Okay, thanks, Griz. Yeah, ring me back.”
We finish eating and get coffee while we wait for Griz. It takes twenty minutes for Roly’s phone to buzz on the table.
“Yeah, you got it, Griz? Go ahead.” He listens and then says, “Whose name is on it? Oh, yeah? All right, then. Yeah, text if you find anything else.”
He looks at me. “In 1967 Petey Deasey holed up in a cottage in a townland called Ballyclash, the other side of Askanagap, she says. The Guards had been looking for him and he held them at bay for twenty-four hours before they arrested him. He served two years for various crimes. The cottage was packed with guns and TNT.”
“Does Niall Deasey own the cottage?” I ask in a quiet voice.
Roly shakes his head. “Nope. He must have sold it. Some woman’s name on it. Not Deasey.”
“Oh.” I’d been so sure. “Where is it? Did Griz have an address?” I’m already putting it into my phone.
“Just Ballyclash. Ah sure, we’ll be able to find it. It’s just a little place anyway. Let’s just go take a look.” Roly puts a twenty-euro note down on the table, jumps up from his chair. “Maybe this is it, D’arcy.”
* * *
It takes us nearly forty minutes on the tiny roads. The house is on the side of a narrow country lane stretching west from the signpost for Askanagap, pointing away from the mountains. It’s desolate out here, the stone walls alongside the road overrun with yellow gorse and scrubby brush. We wouldn’t know we were there if the GPS hadn’t told us we’d arrived.
It’s a low gray stucco cottage, completely out of sight of any other house and shielded by an overgrown stand of pines that’s come up all around it, crowding it against the slope of the mountain.
We pull into the driveway and get out. It looks utterly abandoned, as if no one’s been here in years. The roof is covered with green moss, the blue paint on the front door is peeling, and there aren’t any patio chairs or newspapers or flower pots or anything to indicate human habitation. We try the front door and find it locked, then knock. We don’t really wait for an answer before going around back.