Roly’s phone buzzes and the animal, whatever it was, bounds away into the trees.
* * *
Griz has texted him five names, two from vehicles caught on CCTV around the time Teresa McKenny went missing and three from June Talbot. It’s all she can find. He writes them down on a little sheet of paper from his glove compartment and hands the McKenny ones to me. “Ring ’em up,” he says. “Ask them some basic questions about the car, when they got it, has it ever been stolen, where is it serviced?”
“Are you…?”
“Just do it.” He stands on one side of the car. I stand on the other. I call the first guy. He answers and when I tell him what I want, he sounds suspicious. Maybe it’s my accent, but it takes some convincing before he gives me what I need. I call the second one. He’s not home but his wife gives me everything I need.
When Roly’s done, we get back in the car. “Well?” he asks me.
“The cars have never been stolen. They’ve both been fairly dependable. The Skoda is serviced at Lewis Motors in Bray and the Ford at, uh, Ryan’s in Wicklow. What about you?”
“Nothing good.”
“You thought we were going to get a hit on Deasey’s garage.”
“Yeah but. It fits, D’arcy. I was thinking, how could the same fella take different women without the same car showing up each time? I was thinking, who might have easy access to different cars, with different number plates? Fella who runs a garage.”
“It was a good thought,” I say. “You need more IDs. You need them all.”
“I know.”
“Besides,” I say, “you told me that Niall Deasey had a solid alibi for Teresa McKenny and June Talbot. He’d left Ireland at that point, right? Moved to London.”
“Croydon,” Roly says.
Croydon.
Croydon.
“Call Griz,” I say quickly. “Put her on speakerphone.”
“What?”
“Do it.”
When she answers she says, “For fuck’s sake, Roly.”
“Griz,” I cut in. “That file you had. Of the serial murders in Ireland and the UK. Can you find it?”
“Right here. Why?”
“Can you read something to me? It had something about a series of murders in Croydon. What were the years?”
She reads it out: “1999, 2000, 2007, 2011.”
“Thanks, Griz. Hang on the phone, will you?” I can hear her breath over the speaker system.
I turn to Roly, talk to his profile in the dark car. “Croydon, Roly. Croydon. We were trying to find the pattern in Ireland, the disappearances here. But it doesn’t fit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen. He was here, Niall Deasey. He was here when Erin disappeared, 1993. And Katerina Greiner. And then … Teresa McKenny in 1998. Then he moves to London. To Croydon, Roly. And it didn’t seem like a pattern, because it wasn’t. Not here, anyway. It wasn’t a pattern here.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was living in Croydon! After everything that happened, he moved to Croydon, where his half-brother had a garage, for almost twenty years. And when Griz and I were looking at murders and disappearances in Ireland—unsolved ones—she pulled the UK ones, because of the north, and I looked and there were four women who disappeared in Croydon. Four women picked up off the street or in parks. They disappeared and then their bodies were found in local parks around two weeks later, submerged in water. All four died of blunt head trauma.”
“Jaysus.”
“Look at it, Roly! Erin and Katerina Greiner, 1993. Teresa McKenny in 1998. Then he moves to Croydon and the first Croydon one was 1999. The second, 2000. The third, 2007. The fourth, 2011. And then in 2016, Niamh Horrigan goes missing.” But as I say it, I realize.
“But what about June Talbot?” Roly says. “He was living in Croydon in 2006. And he was in hospital, remember.”
“You’re right. Maybe she was … ah, shit.”
We sit there in silence. On the other end, Griz is rustling papers. We can hear her. And then she calls out, “Guess what 2006 was? Guess what it was? Petey Deasey, Niall Deasey’s father, there’s all this stuff about him in the file. It has his birth date, too. September sixteenth, 1926. It was his eightieth birthday. How much do you want to bet the family had a big old party for him? Maybe they got him out of hospital to go or the dates are off or something?”
“Griz, go check on it. See if you can find out when he was actually, definitely in hospital,” Roly says.
“Yeah—Wait. Roly, Maggie. I just got a text from my friend at the tax office. He got the records on that house in Ballyclash. It is owned by a woman. Her name is Mary Sheehan. She’s dead now. But listen, he looked her up and guess what her maiden name was?”
“What?”
“Deasey! She was Petey Deasey’s sister, Niall Deasey’s aunt.”
“Are ya serious?” Roly is hunched forward in his seat. “Griz, listen. Thank you. We’ll be in touch. We gotta figure out what to do here.”
Roly starts up the car but doesn’t start driving. “Are you going to call Regan?” I ask him.
He looks over at me. “I don’t know. There’s no one at that cottage now. Maybe there’s some evidence there that they can use to go nab him in Arklow. But if I call out everyone to go to an empty house … I’m not supposed to be looking at this.”
“What we’ve got is pretty good,” I tell him. But even as I say it, I know he’s right. We’ve got a few circumstantial coincidences. And we’ve got an empty house owned by Niall Deasey’s aunt.
“What do you want to do?” I ask Roly. “Check it out? We’d have to break and enter.”
“Nah, we’d better not.” He starts up the car, pulls off the verge without even looking. “Let’s head back. We need to think about this, D’arcy. Griz is going to get on to the hospital. Regan might be able to get a search warrant for the garage.” We drive in silence for a good twenty minutes, back toward Kilmacurragh and the M11. The car is full of our frustration, like a bad smell. We’re almost to the motorway when he slows, slams his hand down on the steering wheel, and says, “Fuck it, I’m going back.”
I grin at him. “Like I said, it’s your funeral.”
45
TUESDAY, JUNE 7,
2016
The cottage looks different now, the trees casting long shadows, the sound of our tires on the gravel driveway somehow louder.
Roly has a flashlight and he gets it out and shines it on the front door and in through the front windows. He knocks half-heartedly and then he stares at the window next to the door for a minute.
“Did you hear a dog whining?” Roly asks me. “I could swear I heard a dog whining inside.”
“Yeah, you’d better check. It could be trapped in there.”
“Yes,” Roly says in a fake voice. “You are correct. It could be trapped in there.”
I take the flashlight from him and shine it on the lock. “Roly, look.” We hadn’t noticed before, but it’s new, the wood freshly chipped where the screws went in.