'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 15 & 16

“Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I got stuff to do around here.” He sounds awful. “What are you gonna do, baby? You gonna come home now we know it’s not Erin?”

“No, I’ll stay a bit, Uncle Danny. Her scarf was there, her I.D. She must have had something to do with this woman, whoever she was.”

I hear a clink as he drops a glass in the dishwasher. “What do you mean? Like she had something to do with a murder? But don’t they think she went back to Dublin after she was down there? Didn’t they find that piece of paper?”

“No, no. But maybe she knew this woman. Maybe she gave her the scarf. I don’t know. Look, I’m going to try to do whatever I can to help them figure this out, Uncle Danny, okay? Don’t worry.”

I can hear the emotion in his voice. “Okay, baby. Take care now, right?”

Brian answers on the first ring and when he hears my voice he asks, “Are you okay? Did they find her?”

“No, it’s not her, Bri.” I give him the update. “Uncle Danny is a mess. Can you check on him?”

“Yeah, we’ll go over tonight. Take him some dinner.”

“Thanks. Give Lil a hug.”

A low-slung but rising sun hides behind the buildings surrounding the Trinity forecourt. Dr. Conor Kearney, Associate Professor of History, Room 4000, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin 2. I walk slowly across campus to the Nassau Street entrance, and then up Nassau Street toward St. Stephen’s Green, where I find a coffee shop that has Wi-Fi. It’s busy but I get a table at the back and start working the missing persons angle. The Irish Times has an online archive — I’ve already subscribed — and I start searching for stories about missing persons between 1992 and 1994. I come up with twenty-three involving women of the right age. Most have updated stories indicating the women were found safe, but there are eight that I save to my desktop.

There are four stories about Erin’s disappearance from 1993. I vaguely remember reading the first two, which have a panicked tone. It’s clear that the reporter covering the story, as well as the guards working the case, started out thinking that she would be found in the mountains. But the third story, which appeared after they found the piece of paper at the bed-and- breakfast, is a shift. The reporter writes that “the Gardaí are asking the public if they saw the American student, Miss Erin Flaherty, on or around September 17 or 18, either in Dublin or in any other location around Ireland.” For some reason, the press referred to her as a student, as though that was the only reason an American would have moved to Dublin. Another story announced that the search in the Wicklow Mountains had been called off, “given new information.” The fourth story appeared six months after Erin’s initial disappearance and quotes Garda Sergeant Ruarí Wilcox as saying, “The Gardaí are still actively following up on leads. We are doing everything we can to find out where Miss Flaherty went after leaving Wicklow.” Where she went.

When I expand the search perimeters over the years, I find more follow-up stories and then, after Teresa McKenny and June Talbot disappeared, a story about the formation of the task force. Roly’s name starts appearing in the stories. I’ve read all these, but not for a while. There are a few things that jump out at me. The first is that even after the formation of the task force, the investigating officers — even Roly — talk about Erin in a slightly different way than they talk about the other victims. In 2009, a reporter asked Wilcox about the fact that Erin Flaherty’s body was never found, and he made it clear that he also thought that was suspicious.

I go back to the other women who went missing in Ireland in 1993. There was a forty-year-old mother of six who disappeared from her home in Donegal, a couple of young girls who were reported missing but then found in County Cork. There’s a German backpacker who may have visited the monastery at Glendalough and a twenty-three-year-old woman who took a bus to Galway from her home in Wexford and never contacted her family. The Wexford woman and the German backpacker are the ones that have my attention. I write the names down — Louise Dooley and Katerina Greiner — and finish my coffee.

I’ve spent hours at home Googling the list of persons of interest in the original investigation, checking Facebook and LinkedIn, with nothing much to report. I let myself search for Conor and come up with all the same pages I’ve seen before, department information on Trinity’s website, announcements for his latest book about Ireland after World War II, a picture of him from the book jacket. The first time I saw it, late at night, a few Novembers ago, while Lilly slept inside and the water moved against the beach outside the windows, I almost gasped, seeing him after all these years, an older Conor, but recognizable.

I let myself stare at the photos from the launch party for the book at Trinity a couple of years ago. There’s a picture of a beautiful blond woman, dressed in a flowing yellow dress, a huge smile on her face as she poses next to older Conor. Dr. Kearney and Ms. Arpin, the caption reads. I let the little knife edge of pain slide underneath my skin for a moment and then I slam the laptop closed and get up to go.

St. Stephen’s Green is exactly as I remember it, flowering trees and hedges lining the walking paths, the pond placid and full of ducks. The park is only moderately full; I find a bench in the sun and I have it all to myself once a young woman with a stroller moves along, the toddler in the stroller shouting about the ducks as they go.

Every man who walks by could be Conor, but I get tired of the disappointment and I close my eyes and let the sun warm my face. I’m still jet-lagged and sleep deprived and for the first time since I arrived, I let myself relax a little, let go of the tension.

I must doze off for a minute but when I start awake, the voice is still clear in my mind. I was at the hotel in Glenmalure. Talking to the woman behind the bar. The Guards were in a few months ago asking about a German girl. I think they found her, though. They didn’t ask about your cousin.

A German girl.

Griz answers on the first ring, like she was waiting for a call.

“It’s Maggie D’arcy,” I say. “Roly told me he’d be in Wicklow all day but I thought I’d better tell someone. I just remembered something. There was a German girl. Back in 1993. The first time I went down there, the woman at the hotel mentioned that someone had been asking about her. She said they found her, but maybe she knows something. Maybe there was a mistake.” I don’t say anything about my archive search.

But Griz already knows about her. I can tell by the way she hesitates. “Thank you, Detective D’arcy. I’ll make sure we follow up. I’ll ring you if we need to ask you any more about it.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thank you.”

There’s a shout in the background. She’s not indoors. “I’ve to go,” she says. I recognize something about the quality of the noise behind her. She’s got a lot of people, a lot of cars around her.

“Has something happened?”

She hesitates. I can feel her wrestling with herself, trying to decide. I’ve been there. In the end, I’m a fellow cop.

“You’ll see it later on the telly,” she says, “if the number of cameras here is any indication. We found something.” She hesitates again. “We found something of Niamh’s.”  

 

Chapter 16

1993

 

AFTER BERNIE FOUND THE SCRAP of paper with the bus times at the bed-and- breakfast, Roly told me to sit tight and wait for word. “We’re following all the leads,” he said, distracted, “just making a courtesy call before heading off to Galway to check bus station security tapes. Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. It may be a couple of days.”

But I was still thinking about the bartender at the Raven. I went for a run in a little park further down Ringsend Road and then, wearing one of Erin’s cotton fisherman sweaters against the cold afternoon, I walked into Temple Bar. The streets were busier now at the end of the working day, buses pulling up along St. Stephen’s Green and commuters hurrying along to their homes, their faces cast down at the sidewalk. The air smelled deliciously of smoke and, though it wasn’t raining, the gray, metallic tang of rain.

At five-fifteen, the pub was about twenty times as full as it had been before. I pushed my way up to the bar and looked for the red-headed barman. He wasn’t on duty — the older man with the moustache was holding court instead — and I was just about to go when I saw the redhead sitting at the end of the bar, a pint of Guinness in front of him. He was chatting with a very pretty blond woman who looked interested in whatever he was whispering in her ear, and he didn’t look like he wanted to be interrupted. I ordered a pint and took it down to his end of the bar anyway.

“Hi,” I said, leaning in and addressing him over the woman’s head. She looked up and smiled. My bartender friend didn’t smile. “I don’t know if you remember. But I was in yesterday and I thought that maybe you thought you recognized me. The thing is, it may have been my cousin. Or you may have thought I was my cousin, I mean. We look a lot alike. And I don’t know if you heard, but she’s missing. The Guards are looking for her and I came over from the States to help find her. If she came here a lot, you might have seen something or heard something that could help us find her.”

He stared at me for a minute and then muttered, “Jaysus.”

The woman was staring at me, too, and she put a hand to her chest. “Not the American girl who went missing down in Wicklow? It was on RTÉ this morning. You’re very like her, aren’t you? Sean, do you know her?”

“No, I don’t know her,” he said, in a resigned way. “Not really. But she used to stop in quite a bit and your man Andy fancied her, so sometimes I’d ring him up if she came in. It gave me a turn when I saw you. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, she’s come back. That’s grand, so.’ But then I realized you weren’t her. You’re very like her, but you’re ... not her.”

“No,” I said. “Did she ever talk to you? Did you ever see her with anyone in here?”

He hesitated and then he said, “We just chitchatted a bit, if you know what I mean. At the bar, like, with Andy.” He pointed to a skinny, acne-plagued teenager behind the bar. “I knew she was American and all that. God, you look like her. I could have sworn it was her. Ah, yeah, we chatted sometimes, but not a lot.”

“Was she ever in here with anyone? A man?”

“No, she always came by herself. She mentioned getting off work a couple times, like, that it had been a long day or whatever at the café. She’d usually have one pint and look at a newspaper or just have a chat with whoever was around.”

“Did she ever meet anyone in here? Did guys bother her?”

He hesitated. “They always bothered her, but she didn’t let them bother her, if you know what I mean. She knew how to smile and chat for a minute and then move on if she wasn’t interested. Working as a barman, you see a lot of different sorts o’ brush-offs. She was a pro, she was.”

“So, no one ever made it past the brush-off?”

He hesitated again and I felt a little prickle at the base of my neck. This was it. Whatever he was going to tell me next was important. It was why he said “Jaysus” when I came over. He was afraid of something.

“What? Who was it?”

He thought about lying, then thought better of it.

“All right, look. I don’t know if this is important at all. But back in, oh, I guess maybe August, end of the summer, she was in and these four fellas were talking to her and I noticed she didn’t just brush them off. They were talking real intensely, like she was interested in whatever they were telling her. I heard one of them say he was staying at the Westbury and they were going to be there later and she should join them. I was listening because like I told you, your man Andy really fancied her and I was wondering would she go or stay, so I could tell Andy, like. He was gearing up to ask her out for a bite to eat. He had it all planned out, the sad bastard.”

“Did she go?”

“I don’t know. It got busy and when I looked up again, they were all gone.”

“So ... what? That’s it?”

“Well.” He hesitated again. “Two of ’em were Americans and the other two were Irish. One from the north. The Americans were older fellas, but the Irish two were a bit younger, like maybe thirties. That seemed weird, for one thing.”

A group of guys at the back of the room were laughing loudly and shouting. I had to lean in to hear the barman’s words.

“They were asking her where she was from,” he said. “I heard them asking if she knew someone named Pete O’Connell and she said she did but I think she was just slagging ’em off, like, ‘Yeah, do you know how big America is, you eejits?’ and they were all laughing. Then, like I said, it got really busy and when I looked up again they were gone. She was, too.”

“Is there any way to figure out who they are? They didn’t pay with a credit card or anything, did they?”

“For pints? No. Maybe the Westbury would know.”

“That’s a good idea,” I told him. “What about the other two?”

He hesitated again. “Like I said, one of them was from the north. One was from here. I heard him saying he was from Arklow, something about coming up to Dublin to get parts, like maybe he ran a garage.” He took a deep breath. “I’m not a hundred percent, but I heard the other lad call him Niall.”

“Where’s Arklow?”

“Down in Wicklow.”

I could feel my heart speed up a little.

“When you say the north, you mean north like Northern Ireland?”

“Yeah.” There was more. I could tell.

He looked at the woman as though he was hoping for guidance. “The other fellas, the Americans. Like I said, they were a bit older. The Irish fellas didn’t know them. Didn’t know them already, like. They were meeting for the first time. The Irish two came in first and then the Americans came in and one of them kind of looked around and then he held up his newspaper — it was some kind of sign — and then they went over and shook hands and they started talking to each other. They seemed to have a lot to say.”

I looked from him to the woman and back again. “So?” I was missing something.

“So they had a look about them. The Irish guys. If you want to know the truth, they looked like Provos. Especially the guy from the north.” I must have look confused, because the woman explained, “Provos. Provisional IRA.”

“Really? And Erin — my cousin — she was talking to them? To all four of them?”

“That’s it,” he said. “And it’s right after that that she stopped coming in.”

I waited, and finally he said, “There was something about them. I’ve been a barman a long time. You see all kinds, you know, you really do. Something about those fellas made me wonder what she was mixed up in and hope she was all right.”

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