'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 5 & 6

Chapter 6

Thursday, May 26, 2016  

 

THE AER LINGUS NONSTOP to Dublin runs overnight. I sleep a little and when I wake up they’re serving tea and coffee. The coffee is strong and dark, and I’m awake and on edge, teeth brushed and face washed in the airplane restroom by the time we land. Ready. I get through immigration and customs quickly, with a wink and a “Don’t work too hard now, love,” from the officer when I say I’m here on business.

This time, I arrive on a perfect day. Blue skies. White clouds. Sun shining. One in a million. The airport seems completely new, shiny silver and glass, a chic restaurant with pale wood décor just outside the passenger arrivals area. There are huge black-and-white pictures of Irish men and women lining the hall, some pale-skinned, red-haired, freckled, but not everyone, not anymore. There are little stories below the photos. I grew up in Lagos and came here for medical school. My family is from Enniscorthy. Not a psychedelic carpet to be seen.

I’ve read the stories. In the twenty-three years since I was last here, Ireland’s been up and then down and now, maybe, from the looks of things, up again.

Roly Byrne is waiting for me. I catch a glimpse of him through the crowd. He’s craning his neck, looking around, and when he sees me, his face breaks into a huge grin.

He surprises me by wrapping me in a tight hug. He smells good, lemony, like expensive soap and aftershave.

“You’re looking great, D’arcy,” he tells me, taking my carry-on without asking and leading the way through the waiting crowds. “Getting on agrees with you. Myself, on the other hand ...” He runs a hand through thinning blond hair, cropped short, and makes a funny face that emphasizes the lines fanning out from his eyes. He’s fit, still wiry, a greyhound of a person.

“You’re no worse than you always were,” I tell him. He puts a hand on my arm and says,

“What do you want to do? I need to head down to Glenmalure. I can take you to your hotel, you can have a shower and then I can tell you what we’ve got once you’ve had a sleep.” 

I think for a moment. “Let’s head to the scene and you can brief me on the way.”

“I won’t be able to take you up to the site,” he says, giving me a sidelong glance. “You know that. At best you’ll be able to see the staging area for the search.”

“I know. But it’s been so long. I just want to remind myself of the place, see how far it is from where I found her necklace, that kind of thing.” I force myself to make it sound breezy.

He hesitates for a minute and then says, “Cool.” Kyoooool. I completely forgot about the way Roly Byrne pronounces cool and I smile in spite of myself. He points toward the airport exit. “I’ll take you through the city center so you can see the changes. Let’s go.”

His car is a late-model silver BMW, so clean I can practically see my reflection on the door. I run a hand over the hood. “Fancy car, detective.”

“Feck off,” he says good-naturedly and tosses my bag in the back seat. The interior of the car smells strongly of lavender. “Sorry,” he says, noticing me sniffing the air. “The wife has some special oil she plugs in. She says the car smells of stinky runners after I’ve been in it.” He grins, looks over at me.

“It’s a bit weird, isn’t it? We’ve both kids, you’re a cop now. It’s twenty-three years.”

“It is weird,” I say. “Getting older is weird.” 

Once we’re out of the airport, he hands over a paper cup of coffee. “That’s for you there, D’arcy.”

“Thanks. How thoughtful of you.”

“Oh, I’m a very thoughtful lad these days. You should see me, always doing the washing up, doing the school drop-off. I gave Laura a week at a yoga retreat for her fortieth, so.”

“Yoga? I never would have thought it.”

“You wouldn’t find me doing the yoga, now.” He winks at me and I laugh.

“So,” he says. “Do you even recognize the place?”

Coming down O’Connell Street, it’s almost the same, the wide bridge ahead, shops and neon signs, Dubliners crossing in every direction, but as we cross over the Liffey, I lose track of where I am for a second. There are new buildings, a new bridge, shaped like a harp. But then I see Trinity and the Bank of Ireland and the bottom of Grafton Street and I get my bearings again before we turn. “You should see her old neighborhood,” Roly says. “It’s all Facebook and Google offices down there. They’re even making some kind of skyscrapers out of Bolands Mills.”

We head south, through quieter Ballsbridge and Donnybrook. I’m off center from the changes to the landscape, the new buildings, the jet lag.

“I’m glad to see you happy,” I say. “Tell me about the job.” I’m not ready to talk about Erin yet.

He follows my lead. “Yeah, job’s good. I’m detective inspector on our Serious Crime Review Team, which is our cold-case squad. It was formed in 2007 and they put me on because I was a detective on the task force looking at the Southeast disappearances. I must have told you that. I’m hoping for the homicide squad at some point, but it’s good, so. Now, I’ve a bit of irony for you. My superintendent will be a familiar name to ya.” 

“Wilcox?”

“That’s the one. He’s all right, though. Mostly leaves me to it. He’d rather play golf most days. But when I mentioned you were coming over he warned me off letting you get too close to the case. Again.” He looks over at me, serious now. “I’ve to watch myself, D’arcy. Just so you know.”

“Of course,” I say, feeling my spirits sink a bit.

“Anyway, I’ve a good team. You’ll meet them. I have a sergeant and two detective Gardaí I’ve assigned to the discovery. They want to ask you some questions about your ... about Erin. They’re just getting up to speed now. The scarf’s only just been found. We have a tech designated to the team and she’s working away. Hopefully she’ll have something for us. It’s all a bit more reactive than the way we usually work. Normally we’d identify evidence for testing or witnesses to be interviewed again, but because of Niamh Horrigan we’re working parallel to the missing persons investigation. It’s a bit mad, to tell the truth, but if there’s a possibility of uncovering anything from the other cases that might help find her we’ll keep at it.”

“Of course. I’d like to help however I can.” The look on his face makes me add, “However Wilcox lets me.”

“How about you, D’arcy? How’s the job for you now?”

“Yeah. Job’s good on this end, too. I’m still working homicides. I like my team, like the work. Nothing to complain about. I made lieutenant a few years ago. Sometimes I don’t know how I got through the years after I got divorced, when Lilly was little, but she’s fifteen now and it feels like I’ve got room to breathe again.”

“Fair play to you,” Roly says. “Laura was home full-time during all the years ours were little. There were weeks I hardly saw them. But she kept things going. She’s a great woman now. You’ll meet her.” Roly and Laura have four kids, two girls a little older than Lilly and two little boys. He sent me a picture a few years back, the boys blond and impish, the girls tall and pretty, everyone dressed in Christmas best. “I saw you had a big case there a few years back,” he says quietly. “On those serial murders.” 

I feel heat rise toward my face, every nerve ending in my body suddenly alert. I do the thing I do to stop the rush of adrenaline. I breathe. Inonetwothreefour. Outfivesixseveneight. The first breath slows the response, the second chases back the heat. “You Googled my cases, Roly?”

“Only I read about it on some law enforcement news thingy. I saw Long Island, like, and wondered if it was anything to do with you.”

I take another breath, feel him hearing it. “Yeah. That was a crazy one. How did you and Laura meet, again?”

He glances over. “Ah, it was a couple years after ... well, after you left, after everything. You might remember I always liked to keep my flat nice. I went along to this decorator’s showhouse and there was a room that I loved. I just walked in and I thought to myself, I’d like to live here. A few months later, I started chatting to her at the pub, we started talking about our jobs, she said she was an interior designer and, trying to impress her, I told her all about the showhouse and the room I loved.”

I interrupt him. “And she’d done the room?”

“Ah, you bollixed my story. That’s right. That was it, but. I knew that night I was going to marry her. I didn’t tell her for a couple days.” He winks at me. “But I knew that night. Love at first sight, like.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me how my love life is going, Roly?” I grin at him from my reclining position.

“Since you bring it up, how’s your love life going?”

“It isn’t,” I say. “Not so’s you’d notice.” 

“No? You’re not a whaddayacallit, cougar?”

I laugh. “I don’t think so. The only guy I’ve dated seriously since the divorce was like fifteen years older than me.”

“Really? An oul’ fella?”

“He wasn’t that old. I was thirty-five then. He was fifty.”

“Sure, I’ll be fifty in a few years,” he says soberly. “There hasn’t been anyone since then?”

“No,” I say. “Not really. It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“Why’d you get divorced? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“We got married because I was pregnant. It was okay for a bit, but ... there wasn’t enough there to go the distance.” It’s the best way I can think to say it, but it doesn’t quite capture the sadness of my last couple of years with Brian. “It’s actually so much better now. We get along pretty well. Lilly’s doing great.” 

Our conversation slows and I fall asleep for a bit. When I sit up we’re already well south of Dublin, into green fields and sheep. I feel something wash over me, despite everything. Awe. It’s so beautiful here, it fills me up with a kind of glorious recognition. Ireland.

“Good kip?”

“Mmmm.” I take a long sip of the coffee Roly got me, rub my eyes and fix my seat.

“Okay,” I tell him. “I’m awake now. What can you tell me about Niamh Horrigan without putting yourself in the shit?”

He looks over at me and winks. “The family rang up the local lads in Galway Monday morning. Niamh Horrigan, age twenty-five. She’s a teacher at a school there. She had planned to walk part of the Wicklow Way at the weekend. She was staying at the youth hostel in Glendalough, and on Saturday morning she woke up and left early. They think she was going to try to walk to Glenmalure as she was booked at the hostel there for Saturday night. Then she was to take the bus from Roundwood back home. Her family expected her home Sunday evening, started ringing her mobile. She didn’t answer. When she wasn’t home by Monday morning, they got the Guards involved.”

“Phone?” I ask.

“It’s not pinging, wherever it is. Could be the battery died, could be someone switched it off. You know yourself. Anyway, so, they were out looking for her, with the dogs, and they found the scarf. I’ll show you on the map when we get there. It’s fairly far away from where you found the necklace, up in the trees. As I told you, one of the lads remembered the description and they rang me up. Techs started excavating the site yesterday.” I try to figure out what he’s not saying. My instinct tells me that Roly’s urgency yesterday means there’s something else.

“Bad luck about the phone. Anything else? Is the bed-and-breakfast still there?” 

“Your woman’s not running it as one anymore, but the local lads made sure Niamh hadn’t been there. I’ve a bad feeling, D’arcy. As for the excavation around where they found the scarf, it may be a few days. They have to do it very carefully. If there are remains, they don’t want to disturb the evidence. Ah, you know all that shite.”

I look out the window for a long moment. “Remind me about McKenny and Talbot.”

“All right. This has all been in the papers. My team had taken a look at the cases a couple years ago, even recommended to the local lads they interview some witnesses again. But there wasn’t really anything to go on. Teresa McKenny, twenty-two when she disappeared while walking from Aughrim to her job at the golf course in Macreddin Village in June of 1998. Tiny little places, so they are. Normally her brother drove her but his car was knackered and so she set off walking. She never made it. Two weeks to the day after she was last seen, her body was found by a farmer in a streambed in some foothills about fifteen kilometers away. She’d only been dead a day, from blunt force trauma to her skull. She’d been raped. Repeatedly. But the fella who did it must have used a johnny. Condom. There was nothing for the techs to look at. The stream was full from recent rain and washed away any trace evidence.

“Then June Talbot in 2006. She was English, thirty when she disappeared. She’d been over here for a few years, living with her Irish boyfriend in Cork and working as an early childhood teacher at a crèche in Frankfield. Her friends said the relationship wasn’t going too well. Maybe she had a fella on the side, but no one knew or would say for sure. She went on a bit of a walkabout, just to think things over. Boyfriend swore he didn’t know she wasn’t planning on coming home, but she checked herself into a guesthouse near Baltinglass for a couple of nights and told the woman who owned the guesthouse that she was going walking at Baltinglass Abbey.

“It took them a while to figure out she was actually missing, but two weeks after the last time she was seen, her body was found in the river Slaney by a woman walking her dog. Same details as McKenny. Blunt force trauma, sexual assault, no evidence to speak of. They looked at the boyfriend but he was well alibied and ... that was it. As you know, since McKenny went missing in 1998 we’ve considered your ... Erin’s case a possible link with them, but the fact that her body was never found ... Maybe now we’ll have something. I’m awfully sorry to get you over here under these circumstances, D’arcy.”

I push the emotion down. Not now. “I know. Tell me more about Niamh Horrigan.”

“Lovely girl, everyone adored her. Excellent teacher, nice to her granny. Wasn’t seeing any particular fella but she wasn’t against the odd shag now and again, I’d say. That’s the feeling I get. They’re looking there, of course. She was an experienced mountaineer and hillwalker. One of her friends said she could take care of herself, had in fact once fought off a pervert when she was walking in Killarney. We’ll get some more about that now. But that’s it. Nothing to suggest she was going to take off.” He looks over at me. “She bred Angora rabbits.”

“Rabbits?” 

“Rabbits.”

“She went missing Saturday?”

“Yeah.” Today’s Thursday. Five days.

We drive in silence. The landscape is familiar but new, too, greener and fresher and wetter than I remember.

“Ah, it’s a lovely day now,” Roly says.

It is. The hills are purple and green, bright yellow gorse blooming all along the road. I open my window and breathe in the cool, fragrant air.

We’re in Laragh by eleven and Roly turns left and then hangs right to stay on the old Military Road.

“It hasn’t changed a bit,” I say as we climb past little cottages and fields of white sheep, then start down the other side into the Glenmalure Valley.

“Some parts of Wicklow have,” he says. “But you’re right. It’s a bit remote for commuting, I suppose. The trees have probably grown up.” The plantations on either side of the road seem to have expanded. The hillsides are greeny black with conifers.

They’ve set up a staging area in a little parking area and clearing off the old Military Road. I can see the uniformed guards moving around in their reflective vests and the white vans that likely belong to the crime scene processors. “It’s Coillte property,” Roly says. Queel-cha. “The state forestry service. There’s a track that goes up through the forest not far from where the scarf was found but they’ll still be walking for a bit.” 

The detective in me recoils at the task they’ve got up here. From an evidence preservation standpoint, this is a nightmare. The wind, the weather, the inaccessibility. They may have to come in with helicopters if they find anything, depending on where they find it.

I walk back toward the road, away from the marked cars and crime scene vans, and stand there for a moment looking back across the valley. In my memories of this place, the hills are socked in, obscured by clouds, the air cold and heavy with rain. But today the sun is shining over the valley, the greens are brilliantly green, the purply browns rich and dark. It’s beautiful and wild. The wind moves across the near-distant mountains. I think about the search for Niamh Horrigan. The search for Erin. It seems impossible you could find one woman in all this vastness.

Tell us, Erin. Tell us who. But the only sound is the wind through the trees. The long sweep of golden grass by the road, edged by the rows of conifers, the bright blue sky and smudgy clouds, everything is rich and strong and brilliant.

Ireland.

When Roly comes back, we stand there letting the sun warm our faces for a few minutes, and then we drive down to the crossroads.

 

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