'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 11 & 12

“This case,” John White says. “I keep going around with it. It’s an odd one. No matter how many times I read the files, I don’t feel like I have a sense of it, of her.”

I don’t say anything, though I agree with him. It feels like agreeing would be a betrayal of Erin.

When it’s clear they won’t get anything more useful out of me, Roly stands up, a little too quickly, and says, “Anything else, so? Thank you, Detective D’arcy. Everyone, back to your work.” When they’ve gone, Wilcox comes in and shakes my hand. He’s thinner, grayer, but I remember the fine-boned face, the nice suit and careful blue eyes. He’s the stern, upperclass dad in a romantic drama. “Thank you for your assistance, Miss D’arcy. Detective Inspector Byrne tells me you have made a career in law enforcement as well. Quite a successful one, it seems.”

“Oh, well, thank you.”

“It must be interesting to compare techniques,” he says. “It’s mostly the same, actually. Your team is doing an excellent job.”

He watches me for a minute. He was a handsome man, back then. He still is, elegant, all silver hair and blue eyes and shirt collar. “God willing, there’ll be some progress to report,” he says.

When he’s gone, Roly announces, “Now then, I want you lot working away like busy little beavers. Not a word until you’ve got something for me. The clock is ticking. If there’s a connection between Niamh Horrigan, Teresa McKenny, June Talbot, and Erin Flaherty, we need to find it yesterday. McKenny’s and Talbot’s bodies were found two weeks after they went missing and all indications were that they’d been alive for most of those two weeks. Niamh went missing last Saturday. Tomorrow it will be a week. That means that time is of the essence here. If we’ve just found Erin Flaherty’s remains in Wicklow, then that gives us a new opportunity for evidence. She’s not in the water. If there is anything we can find that can help us get this bastard, we need to do it fast. I can’t think too much about what Niamh Horrigan is going through, but if there’s anything we can do to get her back, we’re damned well going to do it.”

He turns to me and I can see the frustration on his face.

“Get your clogs on, D’arcy. I’m taking you home for dinner.”  

 

Chapter 12

Friday, May 27, 2016 

 

“LAURA WON’T MIND YOU springing a guest on her?” I ask Roly once we’re out of a traffic jam around College Green and heading toward Clontarf to the north.

“Not at all. She’s been looking forward to meeting you.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful,” I tell him. “I feel like they thought I was withholding something.”

“They know you’re not. It’s just, this case. I’ve never had another one like it. But maybe ...”

I know what he was going to say. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m hoping we can get some evidence from Erin’s remains, too.” I catch myself. “If they’re hers, I mean. I’m hoping we can find something that will help with the Niamh Horrigan case. It’s okay to say it.”

“If they’re connected, D’arcy. That’s what I need to keep telling myself. If they’re connected.”

We drive in silence for a bit and then I say, “Let me ask you something. How long has John White been a guard?”

“Long as I have. No, maybe a few years less. Why?”

“Just wondering. Would I have met him on the original investigation?”

“Wouldn’t think so. I think he started out at some godforsaken country station, Donegal or somewhere. Why?”

“He looks familiar. I’m just trying to figure out where I’ve met him.”

“Dublin’s small like that,” Roly says. “I’m always running into people I met on cases or from school. The other week now, I was having lunch at the Stag’s Head and I looked over and there was this fella and we kept looking at each other, but I couldn’t figure out where I knew him from. Finally, it hit me. We’d been standing in line for pints at my local the week before. Don’t know why I remembered his face and all. Ah, here we are, then.”

Roly and Laura have a big, semidetached house on a quiet cul-de-sac. I smell roasting meat and cinnamon when we come through the front door. It’s out of a design magazine, lots of gray and cream and natural fibers. A handwoven blue-and-white rug hangs on one wall, a gleaming blue ceramic vase holds a single orchid. As we come in, a dog barks and two little blond boys run in with a miniature poodle and surround us. Roly introduces them as Diarmuid and Daragh and they say hello very politely and then run off to some other part of the house.

Laura is tall, blond, elegant. She makes me conscious of my makeup-free face, my scuffed boots. Roly kisses her and introduces us and she shakes my hand and says warmly that it’s wonderful to meet me finally, after all this time. Roly hands me a glass of red wine and we sit in the living room. Roly and Laura’s girls, Áine and Cecelia, come in to say hi. Áine looks just like Laura, and Cecilia has Roly’s angular face and pale blond hair.

“Do you live in New York?” Áine asks me.

“Nearby,” I tell her. “Long Island.”

“Áine’s going to go to New York someday to be a fashion designer,” Roly says.

“Dad, a fashion industry executive.”

“Oh yeah, sorry. Only I thought you wanted to be a designer.”

“Dad!”

“Does Dublin seem different to you?” Laura asks me once we’re all at the table, digging into roast pork and potatoes and apples. “It’s been, what, twenty years?”

“It does and it doesn’t,” I say. “I haven’t really explored, but there are so many new buildings on the river. Everything seems ... I don’t know, fancier.”

Laura laughs. “Wait until you see Ringsend. I was raised in Irishtown. When my mam told me they were making the gasworks into luxury flats, I nearly died. The gasworks! But sure we’ve all gotten used to it now.”

“I have a cousin who works for Facebook,” Roly says. “He’s making three hundred thousand euros a year. Little bollix. He used to nick sips of my lager at Christmas. It’s mad.”

They tell me about the other changes, describe their neighbors who lost everything during the recession.

“It was the way we all went house mad,” Laura says. “We did as well. We bought a rental property down the road, thinking we’d double our money. We’re lucky. We can just about pay the mortgage with what we’re getting for rent, but it’s still a bit touch and go. A lot of people we know never recovered.”

I help Laura clear and Roly and I stack the dishes.

“Have you been by that place Erin lived?” Roly asks me, a dish towel over his shoulder.

“Not yet. I checked it out on Google Earth, though.” Laura hands me a glass of whiskey and we all sit in the living room. There’s a gas fire and she turns it on and puts a plate of thin slices of fruitcake out on the coffee table. “It looks like someone’s fixed it up. I should have bought it way back when.”

I take a piece of fruitcake, crumbling it into pieces on my plate. It’s good, dark and spicy and full of dates and raisins.

“Ah, that’s the Dublin game these days. ‘I should have bought this one, I should have bought that one.’ We’re all potential billionaires in our minds.”

“The young ones she lived with have moved on,” Roly tells me. “One of ’em works for one of these software yokes down by the canal.”

“Yeah?” It’s something I’ve been thinking about, the silences, the whispered conversation in Irish. “I always felt there was something they weren’t telling us.”

Laura stretches her feet out toward the fire. “You mean, like they knew something about what happened?”

“No, just ... I don’t know. Something they were holding back.”

“Funny, Bernie thought so, too,” Roly says. “She was convinced they knew something, but we never got anything out of them.”

“How is she really?” I ask after a moment.

“She’s at a place near Drogheda, a sort of nursing home.” Roly looks away. “It’s grim, I’m telling you, D’arcy.”

“He visits every week or two,” Laura says. “He drives up there and spends an hour or two with her. Everyone else has stopped going.”

One of the boys shouts from the other end of the house.

“We’ll know a lot more tomorrow, anyway,” Roly tells me.

“It must have been awful for you and your uncle all these years,” Laura says. “Not knowing.”

“Yeah, that’s the worst of it. He hasn’t gotten over it, you know? He can never move past it.” I think about how on some level, all of us have been stuck back there in the mountains — me, Roly, Uncle Danny, Jessica, Emer and Daisy, probably even Conor and Laura and Brian and Lilly.

Roly reaches over to pat Laura’s knee. He looks at me and suddenly it’s twenty-three years ago and he’s walking ahead of me on the sidewalk, looking back over his shoulder, his blue eyes meeting mine. “I hope we’ll have something soon,” he says. “I’d like to do that for your family.”

 

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