Staying Fit
ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE LAM
Chapter 41
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
ROLY FINDS THE ADDRESS Joey gave him and calls ahead so Alice O’Murchú knows we’re coming.
She lives near Roundwood, in a huge, old stone house that we find at the end of a narrow country lane. When she answers the door, she’s holding a toddler, who’s naked except for a diaper and a purple ski hat. A little girl of about six is coloring at a small table behind her.
“Come in, come in,” she says. “I’ve just got home from getting this lot at the crèche. My partner’s not home yet and it’s a mess. Sorry. But I can tell you what I remember. As long as you don’t mind the chaos. Do you want a cup of tea? I’ve just put the kettle on.”
She tells us that she teaches at an Irish-speaking school in Wicklow. “I love it there. It’s been fifteen years now and the kids are really lovely.”
“We were told that you were working at the hostel in Glendalough in 1993,” Roly says.
“That’s right. I’d just done my leaving cert and I worked there for about a year before going to university.” The toddler makes a run for it into the kitchen and she goes after him, calling out, “I’ll be right back. I’ll just get him something to eat. And come with the tea.”
AARP Membership— $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal
Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine.
She’s back in a few minutes, the toddler under one arm and a plate of chicken and vegetables in the other. She drops him into a booster seat at the table and puts the plate in front of him, then gives the little girl a bowl of apple slices and goes to get our tea. “There, that should keep him busy for a bit. He loves his food, so he does.”
She’s done it properly, a teapot under a cozy and cups on a tray. When she’s poured it out she says, “Now, right, I was working at the hostel and there was this German girl who arrived. Her name was Katerina. I don’t remember her checking in or anything but a couple of days after she arrived, another guest came and told me that she was talking to herself in the dorm and the other girls in there were scared. I went up to the dorm and she was sitting on her bed and just, you know, talking to herself. She wasn’t hurting anyone, but it was kind of aggressive and just, odd, like. I moved the other women into a different dorm and let her stay in there by herself and I thought that was the end of it. But a couple of days later, I was on overnight and I heard shouting down in the kitchen. I went down and there were a couple of English guys who had been out drinking at the pub and had come back to make a big fry-up. From what I could tell, she’d wandered into the kitchen and they’d tried to talk to her and she just lost it. She tried to hit one of the guys with a spatula. They were laughing at her and that made it worse. I think she was really mentally ill. It was very sad. But I couldn’t have her hitting other guests so I told her she’d have to leave if she couldn’t calm down and stay away from them. She was angry at me, but early the next morning she packed up all her stuff and she asked me how to get to the Wicklow Way. She said she was going to walk to Glenmalure.”
We ask some more questions. She doesn’t remember the date exactly, but she thinks it was early September. Joey had already tried to find a record of Katerina’s stay at the hostel, but it had been before computerized registrations and they had thrown out the log books from the ’90s.
We thank her and head back out to the car.
“So she left Glendalough and started hiking to Glenmalure. It’s a two-hour hike, right, something like that. And along the way, when she was almost to Glenmalure, she met her killer.”
“And she made contact with Erin. Or with Erin’s scarf and necklace,” I say. “Somehow.” I open up a map on my phone. “Roly, we’re not too far from Arklow now.”
“Niall Deasey?” I nod. He slows the car and pulls over on the side of the road. “What do you think he’s going to tell us?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just want to get a look at him. I feel like he’s got something to say, you know? You did a search for parking tickets, back during your first review. Griz showed me. A whole bunch of people connected with the investigation had them. Conor. Bláithín. Eda Curran. Niall Deasey’s truck had one too, right around the time June Talbot disappeared. He was out of the country, supposedly, but ... what if he wasn’t? What if he borrowed the truck from his nephew?”
“That’s right.” He thinks for a moment. “You think there’s anything in the politics angle? That thing about her talking to her friends from home about marching season and the riots?”
“Brian said he remembered her talking about it. She was mad at them for not being more interested.” I check my texts but there’s nothing more from him.
“All right,” Roly says. He pulls out again, heading east toward the sea. The sun is setting in the west. There are streaks of yellow behind the mountains on the horizon. The trees are swaying in a stiff wind. “It feels like we’re getting close to something, D’arcy. Do you feel that?”
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t tell him it’s accompanied by a feeling of danger.
You’re getting close.
Don’t get too close.
Chapter 42
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
ARKLOW LOOKS THE SAME to me. More coffee shops maybe, but the Old Ship is still there. It’s four thirty by the time we find Deasey’s garage, on a little residential street backing up to a vacant lot and field. A “Closed” sign hangs in a window and there’s an emergency number stenciled on the glass, but no signs of life. We go around the back of the garage.
The yard is neatly kept, car parts and scrap metal in orderly piles, the windows freshly washed. We knock on the office door and then, after a few minutes, go around and through the big open doors into the garage bays. There’s a guy bent over, working in the wheel well of a Jeep, and when Roly clears his throat, he says, without turning around, “Hang on a mo.”
I look around. The inside of the garage is as well-organized as the outside, with tools arranged neatly on the walls and shelves holding boxed parts and manuals.
“Right, then.” The guy stands up and it’s not Niall Deasey. This guy is stout, barrel-chested, with gray hair and a weather-beaten face. There’s something familiar about him but he doesn’t seem to recognize me at all. In fact, he looks past me to Roly.
“Pardon me,” Roly says. “You are ...?”
“Cathal Deasey.” The guy looks suspicious now.
Roly takes out his warrant card and flashes it. “Detective Roland Byrne with the Garda Síochána. We were hoping to speak with Niall Deasey. Is he in?”
“I’ll get ’im.” Cathal wipes his hands on his pants and goes through a door at the back of the garage. His accent’s English, not Irish, I think, and suddenly I remember John introducing him to me as “Uncle Cathal.”
“I think he was there that night,” I whisper to Roly. “At the pub. I remember he had an English accent. He’s Niall’s brother.”
“Half-brother, actually. They co-own the garage. He was definitely out of the country when Erin went missing. He’s been living in London and came over to help Niall run the garage a year or so ago. We looked at him but there wasn’t anything there. He wasn’t even involved in the criminal stuff like his brother, though a fella I know on undercover said we shouldn’t be too quick to count him out for a little drugs action here and there.”
We look up to see a familiar, swaggering form coming through into the garage. Cathal Deasey stands behind his brother, protective, a little subservient.
“Can I help you?” Niall Deasey is older, but he’s still handsome, his hair salt-and-pepper now and his blue eyes lined, alive, curious. He gives us a broad, welcoming smile, an absolute fake. “Problem with your car?”
“No, nothing like that,” Roly says with a smile. “I’m Detective Inspector Roland Byrne, with the Guards in Dublin. I don’t know if you remember, but I had a chat with you a good few years back now — twenty-three, actually — about an American girl named Erin Flaherty. We had a witness who saw you talking to her in the Raven in Dublin not long before she went missing.”
Deasey doesn’t say a word.
“Do you remember meeting her?”
“That was twenty-three years ago. I’ve chatted to a lot of people, men and women, in the last twenty-three years.”
More From AARP
Free Books Online for Your Reading Pleasure
Gripping mysteries and other novels by popular authors available in their entirety for AARP members