Laura and Michael left for Cork early on Monday morning. The plan was to visit Mary Ellen Lehane’s family first on the western side of the county. Then they would make their way across to east Cork to see Treasa Lee’s family in Cobh. If it got too late, they’d stay the night and return to Dublin the following day.
There had been a moment, when Tom let them know who was pairing up with whom, when Laura had hoped she might be teamed up with Ray Lennon. But he’d been chosen to go with their boss, as usual. She didn’t regret her decision to finish with her boyfriend Eoin last year. It wasn’t fair on him, when she had feelings for someone else. And she’d really thought that Ray was starting to give out signals. Yet again, though, she’d been wrong. She was completely bloody invisible to him.
‘I might have hated you at 6 a.m., but good call on the early start,’ Michael said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘It’s going to be another stonker of a day; better we get the driving done early. How long will it take, again?’
‘They say four and a half hours, but I can do it in four. We might need a bathroom break, mind. Unless you want to use one of the water bottles.’
Michael smiled.
‘I’ve never been to West Cork.’
‘You’re shitting me.’
Laura glanced sideways at her colleague. He was as respectably dressed as it got for him – a short-sleeved shirt and pair of Levi’s. They were en route to meet grieving families, so he’d left the sports tees at home. But he’d shaved his spiky brown hair recently and, with his sunglasses on, looked more like a drug dealer than ever. She estimated that she dressed ten years older than him, in her sharp suits and labelled clothes, when in fact, he had a few birthdays on her.
‘I was thinking about bringing Anne and the baby down this summer.’
‘You should,’ Laura said, amused. As a Kerry woman, she’d spent a lot of time in the neighbouring county of Cork. She still couldn’t get her head around Dubliners, who’d quite happily hop on a flight to Spain but wouldn’t think of venturing to other parts of their own country. They seemed to consider the capital’s M50 ring road as some sort of demarcation line.
They made good time and arrived on the Beara Peninsula just after 11 a.m., even managing to stop for a quick breakfast along the way.
‘Do you need the satnav for this last bit?’ Michael asked. ‘The address is Glendale village, but I don’t think the family live slap bang in the middle.’
‘The satnav!’ Laura snorted. ‘What should I type in? The Lehanes’ house? Don’t worry, we’ll find it.’
They were almost at the village when Laura spotted a farmer ushering the last of his sheep into a gated field. She slowed the car to a halt and wound down the window.
‘Pleasant day,’ she said.
‘’Tis.’ The man rested one arm on the gate and looked curiously at the car. ‘Down from Dublin, are ye?’
‘We are today. I’m from just over the way, originally. The Kingdom.’
Michael noticed with amusement that Laura’s Kerry accent got thicker the further they travelled from Dublin.
The farmer raised a sardonic eyebrow.
‘Not going too well for your footballers this year, is it?’ he teased.
‘We’re looking for the Lehanes,’ Michael said, leaning across. He didn’t want to bear witness to a Kerry and Cork slanging match about Gaelic sports.
‘The Lehanes. Is that right now? What would you be wanting them for?’
‘Mary Ellen,’ Laura said. ‘We’re gardaí.’
‘Ah.’ The man’s demeanour changed as he straightened. ‘Turn left before you enter the village. Go up the hill, give or take a mile. Through the crossroads. You’ll see their gate on the left. It needs fixing.’
They thanked him and set off again, following his directions.
‘Does everybody around here know where everybody else lives?’ Michael asked.
‘Michael, everybody around here knows everything about everybody.’
They drove for what seemed like an age along what appeared more like a long weedy entrance to someone’s house than a road. It was a bucolic scene, fields sloping in either direction, some dotted with grazing animals, others filled with golden crops swaying softly in the light breeze.
‘He said a mile,’ Michael griped. ‘We must have missed it.’
Laura didn’t even respond. A country mile was a world away from a Dublin measure.
Moments later they drove through the crossroads. The Lehane house wasn’t hard to find. A woman was standing at the part of the gate that was still attached to its hinges. She waved at the approaching car.
‘You found us alright, then,’ she said, as Laura pulled into the drive. ‘John rang from the next farm over to say you were on your way.’ Her voice was harsh, her tone unwelcoming.
The woman was in her thirties and bore a strong resemblance to her missing sister – black, curly hair and tiny eyes, a pert nose and small mouth. Local officers had visited the family the previous night to inform them that Mary Ellen’s body had been found, so Laura and Michael didn’t have to break the news. Thankfully.
‘We’re very sorry about Mary Ellen,’ Laura said, offering her hand. ‘You must be her sister, Elizabeth.’
The woman looked down at the proffered hand but didn’t take it. Her eyes were bloodshot.
‘I’m her sister. I can’t say the news didn’t come as a relief. We knew Mary Ellen was dead. Four years is too long to go without finding her, though. It’s near destroyed Mammy.’
‘That’s Nora, isn’t it?’ Michael asked. ‘Have you more family?’
‘No, it’s just us two. Our brother’s in England and Daddy died ten years ago. Farming accident. At least he was spared all this. Come in, then. I suppose you’ll be wanting tea?’
‘Just water will be grand,’ Laura said, following the woman as she strode purposefully into the ramshackle old farmhouse. The heat was intensifying as they approached midday and neither detective believed the perceived wisdom that drinking hot tea could regulate the body’s temperature.
Elizabeth brought them through to a small parlour at the rear of the house, just off the kitchen.
The room they entered was dark and gloomy. It had one small window, divided in half by a lace net curtain and faced onto a semi-enclosed yard. A couple of fat bluebottles buzzed lazily against the cracked pane of glass.
A wooden dresser was heaped with old crockery and photos. Beside it, an older woman sat on a hard-backed chair, hands clasped on her breast, rosary beads entwined in her fingers. She wore a pale green blouse stretched across an ample bosom. Legs mapped by varicose veins poked out from under a matching green skirt.
She opened her eyes and made to stand as they entered the parlour.
‘You’re grand, Mrs Lehane,’ Laura said. ‘Not on our account, please. We’re very sorry about your daughter.’
Nora sniffed and bowed her head.
Michael took a seat beside Laura, echoing her words, receiving as little acknowledgement.
Elizabeth sat with her mother, their elbows touching, bodies leaning towards each other almost defensively.
‘I knew she was dead,’ Nora said, resignedly. ‘I felt it. In here.’ She pointed at her chest, where her heart lay broken. ‘Even when they said she wasn’t. They said she’d run off. But a mother knows. When you bring a life into this world, you’re bound, you see. There’s a thread that connects you to your child. They’re part of you, your flesh and your blood, forever. Until you die or they do. You feel light when they’re happy, you feel heavy when they’re sad. Ask any woman. I think that’s what hurt the most – when the other mothers in the village tried to tell me she’d just left. Like I wouldn’t have known.’
Nora closed her eyes and shuddered. Any stoicism she’d been trying to project deserted her.
The pain in the room was suffocating.
‘Did she … did she suffer?’ Elizabeth sounded almost embarrassed to have to ask for information. ‘The guards who came up didn’t know anything. They just said her body had been found and we wouldn’t be needed to identify her.’
Nora stayed silent as her remaining daughter spoke, but Laura could see her body tense.
‘We don’t know,’ the detective answered, honestly. ‘They’re examining all the bodies we found. We think he may have kept her for a while and we believe she was … that he strangled his victims.’
‘I’ll be going up to see her.’ Nora broke the uncomfortable silence that followed.
The two detectives exchanged a glance. Nora caught it. Breathing heavily, she reached across Elizabeth and took a picture from the dresser. It was of a child, a smiling little girl, maybe seven years old. It had been taken on a summer’s day in a field not unlike the one outside. White vest and shorts over tanned arms and skinny, grazed legs, a smile from ear to ear under a shock of dark curls that looked too big for her tiny body. She stood in front of an apple tree with a swing hanging from its branches and you could tell she’d just leapt from its seat to pose. So full of life.
‘That’s Mary Ellen,’ her mother said. ‘That’s my baby. Whatever you saw up in Dublin, whatever he left of her, this is how she’ll always be to me. Lord, she hated school because it kept her indoors. All she needed to make her day was the sun shining. She would be out there making daisy chains and chasing bees, eating jam sandwiches. She was more tomboyish than her brother but pretty enough to charm the wings off a butterfly.
‘You know, she slept in my arms every night until she was three. When I reported her missing, your lot said she was an adult and was allowed off to do her own thing. I told them she’d been taken. I knew she had. If the man who took her didn’t kill her straight away then maybe she could have been saved, if anybody had taken me seriously. You wouldn’t help me find my baby, but you will allow me to see her. I don’t care if it’s only her bones. I’ll hold her one more time.’
Great big tears spilled down the woman’s cheeks, her face crumpling in despair.
‘We’ll see what can be arranged,’ Laura said, gently. ‘But it might be better, Mrs Lehane, if that’s the image you keep of Mary Ellen in your head.’ She pointed at the picture. ‘If you remember her like that, not as a body that’s been taken from the ground.’
Silence descended again, bar the sniffs of the distraught mother. Nora had no more words.
‘You wanted water,’ Elizabeth said, standing abruptly. ‘Come out to the kitchen with me and I’ll get you a glass. Mammy, I’m going to open the back door and let a bit of air in. It’s stifling in here.’
She patted her mother’s shoulder and led the two detectives from the room.
‘We’ll go outside,’ Elizabeth said. She filled a jug with water from the tap, begrudgingly threw in some ice cubes, and grabbed two glasses.
They followed her out to a garden overlooking the rolling plains. An old bench was positioned just outside the back door and they sat on that, taking in the view, as the comforting smell of fabric softener from the sheets hanging on the washing line drifted in their direction.
‘I can’t say what I’m about to tell you in front of Mammy. It will get her all riled up and she’d think I was wasting my time. She reckons you’re all the same. But you’re from Dublin and I don’t know – maybe you’re a bit more open-minded up there.’
‘Who’s all the same?’ Laura asked. ‘The guards?’
‘Aye.’
‘Because the gardaí didn’t take you seriously when you reported that Mary Ellen had gone missing?’
Elizabeth looked at her sharply. Laura held up a conciliatory hand.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We’re open to anything you want to tell us. Mary Ellen was murdered, so everything is relevant now. Anything you have to say will be listened to with the utmost gravity, I promise you.’
Elizabeth hesitated, studying Laura.
‘Aye, well. Let’s see if you close ranks on this one. It wasn’t just that the guards didn’t take Mary Ellen’s disappearance seriously. They ridiculed us when we went to report it, wouldn’t even write it down. She was missing for a month before we could get them to log it with that – what is it you call it?’
‘The Missing Persons Bureau?’
‘Yeah. That.’
‘Sorry, are you saying a whole month passed before her disappearance was logged?’ This was Michael. ‘What date did she go missing?’
‘The 17th of March, 2008. St Patrick’s Day. A month later, they decided they’d finally open a file on her.’
‘Why?’ Laura asked. Considering Mary Ellen had been twenty-five, she could imagine how the family might have met with sceptical reassurances when they’d first turned up at their local station. But there was no excuse, after some time had passed and it was obvious she was indeed missing for the guards not to have logged the report quicker. Even if they had thought she’d gone off of her own volition.
Elizabeth stared out at the rural vista, her eyes sad. She shrugged.
‘You’re going to hear things about my sister,’ she said. ‘They’ll tell you that she was … that she’d go off with anybody. That’s what they said to us when we went down to the station. Laughing and joking while my mother sobbed her heart out. It’s all lies. Mary Ellen was no convent girl. She drank like a trooper and smoked like a chimney. And yes, she had a boyfriend or two. But she wasn’t a slut. She wasn’t some selfish party girl who would have just abandoned Mammy and me. My sister used to bring her boyfriends up here. She didn’t keep dirty little secrets. And she’d got herself into enough dodgy situations to know how to take care of herself.’
‘She was your younger sister?’ Laura asked.
Elizabeth bristled.
‘Yes. By five years. But that doesn’t mean I was soft when it came to her. If I thought she’d just run off, I’d have told Mammy and saved her the worry all this time.’
‘Elizabeth, did your sister ever go with a man who was treating her badly? A chap who might have hit her? Did you get the impression she was hiding anything from you?’
‘I just told you; she didn’t keep secrets from us. And more – Mary Ellen wasn’t stupid. No matter how drunk she was, she never forgot where she lived. She didn’t take drugs or get pregnant. And she wouldn’t come home late at night without being accompanied.
‘She went with a few oddballs, but nobody I can think of who would have laid a hand on her. She wouldn’t have stood for it anyway. But somebody took her, and I think it was someone she knew. You know what the worst thing was at the time she went missing?’
‘What?’
‘Sergeant Doyle. He’s the most senior guard in the area. He came up here last night and it was all I could do not to spit in his face. Back then, he spoke about Mary Ellen like she was something you’d pick off your shoe. He got angry at Mammy because she kept going down and harassing him. I couldn’t go with her every time; I was trying to keep on top of the farm work. But she came back once and wouldn’t speak for days after what he said to her.’
‘What did he say?’ Michael asked.
Mary Ellen’s sister made a choked, angry sound.
‘He said that if – and he stressed “if” – something had happened to Mary Ellen, she had it coming.’
She turned to the two detectives, her face livid.
‘But I know the real reason why he didn’t bother to look into my sister’s disappearance.’