'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 39 & 40

Sarah Stewart Taylor

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Published January 27, 2021

Illustration of fancy pastry with whipped cream and cherry on top

ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE LAM

Chapter 39

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

ROLY CALLS AT SEVEN. I’m still in bed, staring at the ceiling, and I jump up and scramble for the phone. “Roly? What is it? What did Wilcox say? Did you interview Conor?”

I hear traffic noise on the other end, the echo of his car phone system. “Hang on,” he says. “Can you be downstairs in thirty minutes? Around the corner by Morelands?”

“Yeah, I guess, but what’s going on? Won’t the reporters be there?”

“They’ve moved on. There’s a lot happening. Be outside in thirty minutes, D’arcy.”

I’m dressed in jeans and a sweater and boots, standing on the sidewalk around the corner from the Westin and holding two lattes when he pulls up to the curb.

He waits until we’re heading north on O’Connell Street to take a sip and say, “They arrested Robert Herricks this morning. Your tip was a good one. They went to talk to him in Baltinglass last night.” Before I ask he says, “Yeah, they let Griz in on it. I’m not sure what it was that tipped them off, but he had some very disturbing videos on his computer and they talked to the young one who used to work at the golf course. She said he raped her, right around the time Teresa McKenny went missing. She was embarrassed back then, ashamed to tell us what happened, so she tried to point us in the right direction by saying he’d been spying in the loos. But we missed it. We didn’t ask the right questions.”

He looks over at me. “I’m suspended until further notice. Wilcox told me to stay home and cut my grass for the foreseeable future. He ordered Griz and Joey and John White to go back to the reviews they were working on before all this started.”

“Roly, I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”

“Yeah, well. I accept your apology.” He doesn’t look mad, just resigned. And tired. But there’s something else there, too. Something to the set of his jaw, the way he’s gripping the steering wheel as he drives in and out of rush hour traffic.

“So where are we going?”

“We’re going to visit Bernie.”

***

The nursing home is in Drogheda, up by the border with Northern Ireland, an hour or so from Dublin. The drive is boring, motorway and fields. Roly seems to want to be quiet so I listen to the Top 40 radio he puts on and look out the window at the flashing green pasture, the distant spires and gray roofs of towns off the motorway.

Finally I say, “Why do you want to see Bernie?”

“I haven’t visited in a while,” he says. “It’s been too busy.”

“Why else?”

He takes a deep breath. “I tell her everything about my cases. I go up and I tell her about what’s going on and she gives me ... not advice, exactly. But it helps to tell her. I haven’t gone since before we found Erin’s scarf. I want to ask her what she thinks about the receipt, about Katerina Greiner.” He looks over at me. “It’s seventeen days, D’arcy. If Niamh’s not already dead, then she’s about to be. It feels like we’re getting there, like something’s going to break. I’m off the case, but I’m not giving up. I want to talk to Bernie.”

“Will she be able to tell us anything?”

“She’s got this breathing thing,” he says. “It makes it really hard for her to talk, so I try to ask questions she can answer with a nod or a simple yes or no.”

“Is her mind okay? Can she remember things?”

“Oh, she can remember things. That’s what makes it so tragic. Her mind is basically fine, but her body’s falling apart. She gets pneumonia because she can’t clear her airways. She almost died last year.”

“What happened, Roly? You only told me she was shot as part of an operation that went wrong.”

“She was on the drugs squad. You know that. And they were going after some fella who had been bringing heroin from Spain and dealing out of some businesses in Crumlin. Bernie was convinced someone was passing information to him. He kept managing to stay just out of their way. She tried to figure out who it was and wasn’t able to. Anyway, they knew there was a shipment coming in and they went to one of the businesses and got ambushed. She got shot in the back. Bullet tore into her spinal column. For quite a long time, they didn’t think she was going to survive.”

“Did they ever figure out who was leaking?”

“No.” His hands are gripping the steering wheel. The veins in his neck stand out against his pale skin. I let him be for a bit.

“So this receipt,” he says finally. “Griz thinks it shows that something happened when Erin was down in Wicklow. She came back to Dublin and got money and then she took off again. Who was she meeting? Who was she going with?”

“Niall Deasey?” I say. “You know what I thought back then. He definitely recognized me, or thought he did. He didn’t say, ‘Oh, didn’t we meet at a pub once?’ That would be the normal thing to say, right? And he didn’t.”

“Yeah, but he’s a professional gangster, like. They don’t give anything away, D’arcy. We checked him out. He has a great alibi: He was in hospital in London when June Talbot was killed, getting his appendix out.”

“What about Teresa McKenny? He was still living here and operating the garage when she was killed.”

“The ex-wife was pretty sure there was nothing funny going on. You could tell how much she hated him, so I think she might have been only too happy to give him up if she’d had something on him. But she didn’t.”

I watch the fields flash by outside the window. “Okay, but let’s say he had something to do with Erin’s disappearance. Let’s say he recruited her to transport something, drugs, money, guns, whatever, between Ireland and the US. Let’s say something happened and he killed her. Then what’s the connection to Katerina Greiner?”

“She’d been missing for a while. Maybe she’d been with him. Maybe she got wrapped up in something dangerous, too.”

I look over at Roly. “Drugs stuff? Prostitution? Arms smuggling?” “Maybe,” he says. “We didn’t find any evidence of that, but ...”

“But what about Niamh Horrigan and the other two? If he was recruiting Erin or something, if it was something related to Northern Ireland, then what about now? Does that stuff go on anymore? After ninety-eight? The location where Katerina Greiner was found has to be significant, right?”

“I don’t know, D’arcy. It’s hard to explain to ya. This thing, it’s different now. There’s peace. Yeah, there are fellas who still get up to it. Up north, yeah, there’s always the politics. But especially down here, it’s more drugs, organized crime these days.” Roly slows the car. There’s a sign up ahead for the exit to Drogheda and Donore. The M1 continues on to Belfast. “Will we?” he says quietly to himself.

“Will we what?”

“Ah sure, we’re only thirty minutes at this point. We’re too early for Bernie anyway.”

“What?”

“I’m going to take you to the border.” He speeds up and passes the exit and we drive north, past green fields dotted with sheep, stretching out toward low brown hills in every direction. In less than thirty minutes, we’re there; the fields are flashing by when he says, “That’s it. We’re in the north now.”

The only way I know is there’s a sign announcing that all distances will be in miles. “I remember driving up here once when I was a boy,” he says. “My ma had a school friend living in Newry and we came up to visit her at Easter. There was a border checkpoint, a low building, manned by British Army soldiers. The cars were lined up to get through and my da, he was a real joker, like, he said, ‘Ah, I hope we don’t get blown to smithereens, now.’ My ma, she walloped him and said not to scare the children. But the whole time we sat in that long line, an hour or more, I thought about it, about what it would feel like to get blown to smithereens.”

He pulls off the motorway, turns around, and gets us going south again. “We’re back in the Republic now,” he says after a few minutes. “The border’s still there, D’arcy. Who knows, it might come back someday. They’ve been talking on the telly about this vote for Britain to leave the EU coming up. Some fella said maybe that’d bring back the border. And then maybe it all begins again. For now, it’s quiet. For now, there’s peace. Now let’s go see Bernie.”

***

We park in the visitor’s lot and go in. The nursing home is a sprawling single-story building in the middle of an industrial park. It’s barely decorated inside, a few Virgin Marys and landscape paintings on the stark white walls, a strong smell of antiseptic everywhere.

“Hey, Bernie. Look who I’ve got to see you,” Roly calls out when we get to the room. He peeks around the doorway and motions me in. “A blast from the past, sure. Now, how’s herself this morning?” A nurse nods and smiles, leaves us alone.

Bernie is sitting in a complicated-looking wheelchair, a blanket folded over her legs. A television set suspended from the ceiling is on and Roly shuts it off and gives her a little pat on the shoulder. Her hair is shorter and she seems much smaller than I remember, thinner, frailer, but when she turns her eyes to me, I remember them.

“Hi, Bernie,” I say, my voice wavering now that I’m here. “It’s so good to see you.” She tries to smile, but it comes out more like a grimace.

“D’ar ... cy. How you?” The words come out slowly, with breaks for breath in between, but I can understand her. Roly adjusts her chair and talks in a nonstop torrent of words, telling her about the investigation. He gives her everything, every twist and turn, finding Erin’s scarf, the stuff about Katerina Greiner, updates on the Niamh Horrigan search, the things Griz and I found in the files. Robert Herricks. Then, with a glance at me, he tells her about Conor and Bláithín and Erin’s visit to their apartment. She nods, listening, and I can feel that this is a routine for them, that Roly talks so she doesn’t have to.

“Why did ... your cousin go down there?” she asks after a minute. “To the mountains?”

“I know,” I say. “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. Someone called the house that day, from a pay phone, then she left and went to Conor’s house, then she went down to Glenmalure, went walking and lost her necklace, and then she stayed at the Currans’ bed-and- breakfast and, we think, took a bus back to Dublin, met up with someone, changed some traveler’s checks, and disappeared.”

“No,” Bernie says, with a lot of effort. “No ... why mountains?”

“Why did she go to the mountains?” I ask.

“Yes.” But there’s something more she’s trying to say. I can see her struggle with how to express it and give up. “What ... about O’Hanrahan?” she asks finally.

“O’Hanrahan? There hasn’t been much on him. He was connected to Erin Flaherty, but we haven’t found any connection to the other women. You think we should look at him again?” Roly asks. Bernie nods.

“Back in 1993, when I confronted him,” I say, “it was clear he had something to hide. Seeing me, he was freaked out.”

Roly says, “Remember that day we went up there, Bernie? That house? They had a solicitor there and everything, to make sure we didn’t frighten their poor little lad. Remember?” She’s nodding vigorously. “The father. I had the feeling he’d take my head off if I put a foot wrong. And he had a couple of bodyguards hanging around, real criminal types. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, like, but he had badness in him. You could see it.”

She tries to say something, but can’t get it out. It’s excruciating, watching her get agitated trying to speak. “It’s okay, Bernie,” Roly says. “We’re going to let you get some rest now. I’ll be in touch.” The nurse comes back in and we say our goodbyes.

Back in the car, we’re quiet as Roly turns us around and gets us back on the motorway. “It’s awful,” I say. “It’s like she’s trapped.”

“I know. It depresses me for days, coming up to see her.”

“But you still do it,” I say.

He keeps driving.

***

We take the M1 as far as Dublin and then hug the coast down to Killiney.

“You really think we should be doing this?” I ask him when he tells me we’re close. “How will Wilcox feel about you contacting a person of interest?”

“He’s not a person of interest in Niamh Horrigan’s disappearance,” Roly says. “Besides, I’ve nothing to lose at this point, D’arcy. If Wilcox is determined to sack me, he’ll sack me whether I speak to O’Hanrahan or not.”

“Okay. It’s your funeral.” We grin at each other. It’s a gorgeous day, all sun and water and blue sky, the big homes along the hills in front of us like white flowers on a vine.

“You’ll love this,” Roly says. “This is where the posh fellas live. All the celebrities are down here.” The hills are dotted with the fancy houses and gardens, all of them oriented toward the view the way plants grow toward the sun. The O’Hanrahan house — inherited from his parents after their deaths a decade or so ago, Roly tells me — is halfway up the winding road, a small sign alerting me that we’ve reached “Bridgehampton.” The drive is shaded by mature trees, but as we come out into the rectangular gravel parking area in front of the large stucco house, the sun breaks through and the view is all gardens cascading down the slope and, in the near distance, the glittering Irish Sea. A heavily made-up woman in tight pink jeans opens the door when we ring the bell. She barely acknowledges us, but opens the door wide. The house matches the view, blues and silvers and lots of metal and white furniture. A chrome-and-glass chandelier looms low overhead. It’s very modern, with shards of glass and metal poking out in every direction. There’s something threatening about it, the way the shards jut aggressively out into the room.

“We were hoping to speak to Mr. O’Hanrahan?” Roly says, showing his warrant card.

“If you want.” She rolls her eyes, goes to the bottom of the wide, metal staircase, and calls up, “There’s some guards here to see you!”

She turns around and stares at me, barely disguised resentment on her face.

We look up to find him coming down to meet us. Hacky O’Hanrahan has put on weight in twenty-three years, too much of it in his face. He’s jowly and pink, his eyes bloodshot and shifty. When he sees me, he stops, looking startled.

“Hello, Mr. O’Hanrahan,” Roly says. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I spoke to you when we were investigating the disappearance of Erin Flaherty, back in the nineties.”

“Yes, yes, I ... do remember.” His eyes keep darting over to me.

Roly says, “Could we sit down and chat for a bit?”

The woman, who I assume is Mrs. O’Hanrahan, looks positively gleeful. “Of course,” she says. “Come in and sit down.”

O’Hanrahan glares at her, but he leads the way into a pale, elegantly decorated room at the front of the house. The view of the Irish Sea through the huge windows is distracting. It’s like there’s a beautiful woman sitting in the room and no one can look away.

He sits forward in his chair, ready to jump up.

“This is Detective Maggie D’arcy,” Roly says finally. “You may remember her as well.”

“Yes, yes. Of course.” He crosses his legs, then uncrosses them and leans back in his chair.

“We’re going back over our investigation,” Roly says, “and we just wanted to confirm a few things with you. You told us you met Miss Flaherty just the once and that you had no further contact with her after that. Is that correct?”

“Yes, yes, that’s right.”

I pick up the questions. “Though you did call her ... ring her, I mean. To see if she wanted to join you and your friends for a drink.”

“Well, maybe. I really don’t remember. It was so long ago now.” His wife coughs and he starts.

“Did my cousin say anything to you that could have indicated she was in trouble, that she was afraid of someone?”

“I hardly knew her. We didn’t do a lot of talking.”

“Just think. It could be very important.”

“No, nothing like that. It was just ... I did that a thousand times when I was that age. Meeting someone out at a club. You like the look of each other. You go home. That’s it.”

“Except that wasn’t it. You called her. Rang her. You asked if she wanted to meet you and your friends at O’Brien’s.”

He hesitates, then says, “She didn’t seem scared of anyone. As far as I remember, she seemed pretty confident.” He fiddles with the hem of his pants. “But then later, I don’t know, she seemed sad. She was crying and ... it was weird. I thought we’d been having fun and then she kind of freaked out. She was sobbing and trying to hurt herself. I didn’t know what to do.”

Roly and I look at each other. “Trying to hurt herself?”

“She was like, pulling at her hair, like she was trying to pull it out.”

Suddenly, I remember Erin crying, pulling at her hair. I’m sorry, Mags. I’m sorry. If I can just — When was that? Why was she crying? The memory unnerves me. I have no context for it. It just comes out of nowhere.

Roly says, “Why didn’t you tell the Guards that?”

O’Hanrahan’s wife is pacing around the room, picking things up and putting them back down. He carefully places his hands on his thighs, then turns and snaps, “Would you stop walking around? Go get me a Bushmills, if you would.”

“Get your own Bushmills,” she says. We listen to her clatter up the staircase in her high heels.

“Sorry,” O’Hanrahan says. “I was ... I didn’t think it mattered. I guess I was embarrassed. I didn’t want people to think it was, you know, because of me.” He’s lying, but he’s embarrassed too, I think.

“What else?” Roly asks.

“My family thought ... Well, I received legal advice that it might make it look like something had happened when we were together. I was counseled not to say anything about it. My father was ... his businesses. He was concerned about his reputation. Our reputation.” He’s very nervous now, his hands tapping out a fast rhythm on his knee.

“Is that why your father had me followed?” I ask him. “ Because he was concerned about his reputation?”

I can feel Roly’s surprise. He didn’t know I was going to ask that. When O’Hanrahan looks up, there’s genuine surprise on his face, too. “Did he?”

“That day that I waited for you outside your apartment. After that, you told him my name and you told him I’d been asking questions. He had me trailed.”

“He thought you were going to try to get me up on charges or something,” he says. “I didn’t know he had you followed. He was probably just protecting me.” He stands up. “I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you,” he says. When I look up at him, he’s pale in the sunlight coming through the windows. “If you need more information, you’ll have to speak to my solicitor.”

“Okay, Mr. O’Hanrahan. We’ll leave you alone now. You’ll be hearing from us if there’s anything else.”

I see the wife watching from an upstairs window when we leave the house.

We stop and look at the view one more time before we get into the car. The sea reflects the sun; the water is full of diamonds. “That’s the thing about Ireland,” Roly says finally. “One minute it seems like the arse-ugliest spot on the earth, and the next it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.”

Chapter 40

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

IN A COFFEE SHOP in Bray, Roly and I check the online sites for the Irish Times and the Independent. There’s no real news about Robert Herricks, but Stephen Hines and the other reporters stretch it out as much as they can. The Guards are searching properties in Wicklow that Herricks has been associated with over the years. I imagine them approaching sheds and barns and basements, hesitating every time. This could be it. This could be the one.

Niamh.

She’s been gone seventeen days.

“What was that about the fella following you?” Roly asks.

“I told you that, back then. I confronted him with a screwdriver.”

“Ah, yeah. I thought you were mad, you know. I thought you were making that up.”

“Well, I was a bit mad by then. But listen, I just realized. Something about O’Hanrahan made me think of it. Remember I told you that John White looked familiar to me when I first met him? I was asking you about him? Well, I’m ninety-nine percent sure he’s the guy who followed me.”

He’d ordered himself a fancy-looking pastry with lots of frosting and a cherry on the top. He stops demolishing it for a minute and looks up at me. “Are you saying O’Hanrahan hired Johnny White before Johnny White was a guard?”

“I don’t know, but I’d swear in court it was him.”

He thinks for a minute. “Ah, shite. I knew he worked private security before he went to Templemore. You think he was working for O’Hanrahan?”

“I don’t know, but someone leaked to Stephen Hines to put me in the shit, and I’m the only one who can ID him from back then.”

He covers his face with his hands. It’s the worst-case scenario, a trusted colleague, a suspicion, no evidence of corrup-tion, though. He’ll have to go to internal affairs. Or not. Either way, it’s bad. “I can’t even think about that now, D’arcy. Just keep it to yourself, like, okay?”

“Of course. What do we do now, Roly?”

“I don’t know.” When he looks up at me he has a dollop of white on his nose. “But I’ve been thinking about something. That receipt. It shows she was in Dublin on the eighteenth. But it doesn’t show she was in Dublin on the seventeenth. Other than your woman at the bed-and-breakfast’s word that she was getting a bus back, we don’t actually have anything. The son was kind of a dodgy fella, but we couldn’t find anything on him. What do you say we head down to Wicklow and try to talk to her? Before the shit hit the fan, Joey gave me the address of the woman who remembered Katerina Greiner staying at the Glendalough Youth Hostel. Her name is Alice O’Murchú. We could talk to her as well.”

He seems better now, more himself, as though the conversation with O’Hanrahan had reminded him of the battle.

“Okay,” I say. “But you’d better wash your face first.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got frosting on your nose.”

“Ah,” Roly says happily, running a hand over his face. “Disgrace I am. But I think we’ve got something, D’arcy. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I think we’ve got something.”

***

It looks only vaguely familiar to me, a long whitewashed cottage with an addition, the dark forested hills rising behind it.

A woman with white hair answers the door and I search her face for a moment to find Eda Curran in it. Failing, I stick my hand out, introduce myself and Roly, and say, “Is Mrs. Curran here?”

“I’m sorry, she’s not well enough for visitors.” Only then do I notice the woman’s pale yellow uniform and white leather nursing shoes.

“It’s very import ant that we talk to her. It’s related to a police case. We’re detectives.” It’s not a lie. Not really.

“Is this about the girl who went missing?” the nurse asks. Her accent’s not Irish. Eastern European, maybe.

Roly and I glance at each other. “The girl who went missing?” I prompt her. I can’t tell if she’s talking about Niamh Horrigan or Erin. I want her to tell me.

“It was long time ago, I think, but she talks about it all the time.”

“Could we just come in and speak with her?” I say. “I would really appreciate it if you could let her know that I’m here and would like to speak with her.”

“Wait here.”

The sun is bright and climbing in the sky. Roly and I wait in silence.

“She isn’t very good today,” the nurse tells us. “You can come in, but just for a short time.”

The house seems shabbier, slightly darker, as if time has left a coating of dust on everything. Mrs. Curran is on the couch in the sitting room, wrapped in blankets despite the sun streaming in through the windows behind her.

A look of alarm spreads across her face when she sees us.

“I’m Maggie, Maggie D’arcy, Mrs. Curran,” I tell her. “My cousin Erin was the girl who went missing twenty-three years ago. I came to talk to you then. Do you remember me? This is Detective Inspector Byrne. You would have talked to him as well.”

“Of course I remember you.” She tries to smile a little and I can see how sick and how old she is. Her face is pale and she’s so thin I can see the shape of her skull. “Hello, I’m sorry I can’t get up to meet you. I’m not well.” She shifts on the couch and winces a bit. The nurse steps forward to put a pillow behind her.

“We won’t take up very much of your time, Mrs. Curran,” Roly says. “But we were wondering about something. Erin Flaherty stayed overnight with you on September the sixteenth, 1993. I know it may be difficult to remember, but you told us that she was taking a bus back to Dublin that next morning. Did she tell you that directly?”

“I think so.” She closes her eyes, because she’s thinking or because of the pain, I can’t tell. “She said she had to go. The bus was going to leave, she said.”

Roly and I look at each other. That seems pretty definitive. “And you said she didn’t seem upset about anything. She didn’t tell you she was scared of anyone, did she?”

“No, no, I don’t —” She winces.

The nurse steps forward, giving us disapproving looks.

“We’ll leave you,” I say. “There’s just one more thing. Do you have any memories of a young German woman who may have been hillwalking near here, right around the time that my cousin Erin disappeared? All those years ago.”

“A German woman ...” She thinks for a moment. “I don’t know ... I’ve had lots of tourists stay with me over the years, Germans, Japanese. But that was before ...”

“I don’t think she stayed with you,” I say gently. “They would have checked all that in your guest log. We’re wondering more about whether you might have seen her around, walking on the road or the trails.”

“I don’t know. Have they, have they found your cousin?”

“No, Mrs. Curran, but we think there may be a link between her and the German woman we’re interested in.”

“I don’t ... She was a lovely girl. I didn’t know. I said so. That’s what I told you, isn’t that right?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Curran, told me what?”

“Oh, I didn’t know. Isn’t that right, dear?”

The nurse is running out of patience. She starts to say something so I jump in. “Mrs. Curran, your son. Gary. He was there when Erin stayed with you, wasn’t he?”

She looks confused. “He helped me. With the bed-and-breakfast. Didn’t he? I had so many visitors then. People from all over the world. Lovely ... He’s ill, you know. Gary.” She trails off and I look up to find the nurse has come back.

“Is he here now?” I ask her. “Could we talk to him?”

“He went into Rathdrum,” the nurse says. “To the clinic.”

“When will he be back?” Roly asks her. “We’d really like to have a chat with him.”

“By five. He said he will be back by five.”

Roly checks his watch and nods at me. “Okay, we’ll be back then. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Curran.”

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