The empty feeling in the pit of her stomach was threatening to tip over to nausea. Claire pushed her chair back from the desk and rooted around in her handbag. A cereal bar. Perfect. Thank God she’d grabbed it from the cupboard before leaving the house that morning. She hadn’t had time to eat breakfast.
Unwrapping the bar, she took a bite and chewed, thoughtfully. The second trimester wasn’t much better than the first, really. It felt like the evening after the night before. Not the thrown down on the bed, ‘I’ll barf if I move’ early morning hangover sensation she’d had on and off for the first twelve weeks. More like the ‘I can cope but I don’t wanna’ feeling you got when the initial drink-induced dread had subsided. The stage where you knew you needed food to make you feel better, but the thought of it was pretty unappealing. The stage where sitting in front of the television, picking at a packet of crisps, was as much of an attempt as you wanted to make at living. Which worked well on Sunday evenings, back in the days when the feeling actually was a hangover. Not so useful on a busy Tuesday morning with a pile of paper in the in-tray and unanswered emails glowing accusingly from the computer screen. The guilty verdict in the Clarke case had been a huge boost for everyone in the station. But the celebrations could only last so long, and Miriam Twohy was the main thing on her mind now. It wasn’t unusual for young women to head off for a few days without telling their families. But this woman had left a daughter behind, which was enough of a rarity to make Superintendent Quigley put the case to the top of his priority list.
She took a sip from the bottle of water on her desk. She needed to drink more of that stuff as well. Pain in the arse, made her want to pee all the time. But it wasn’t about her any more. That’s what the doctor had said when he’d given her the lecture on hydration, the follow up to the rant about blood pressure and stress and women having babies At Your Age. Funny thing was, thirty-nine was a perfectly reasonable, average age to be a Detective Sergeant. But apparently almost elderly when it came to being a first-timer in the maternity ward.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘Not at all.’
Detective Garda Philip Flynn bustled over to her. It was an old-fashioned word, bustled, but it described Flynn perfectly. She had no idea how old he was. His round cherubic face, coupled with a permanently world-weary air, made it difficult to pin down, but she had no doubt that he’d end up outranking her at some ridiculously young age. And not a rib of grey hair on his head. Finishing the cereal bar in two quick bites, she threw the wrapper into the bin, pulled herself straighter in the chair and tapped purposefully on the computer keyboard. At more than five months gone, there was no hiding the pregnancy from the lads in the station any longer. But that didn’t mean she was going to let them see her take it easy.
‘It’s just we got another call, about Miriam Twohy. Probably a load of rubbish, but you said to pass all the information on …’
‘Absolutely.’
Claire beckoned him forward and tried to avoid scowling as he passed his hand over his hair and patted some invisible strands down into his freshly combed side parting. She knew it was irrational, her dislike for Philip Flynn. Always Philip, no one ever called him Phil. She usually liked the younger guards, not long out of Templemore and dying for a bit of action. Falling over themselves to be helpful in case it got them a leg-up down the line. But this fella was different. From Mull-ingar, father a teacher, mother a nurse. A family straight out of one of those articles the newspapers did at budget time, Mary is a nurse and John is a teacher and their tax-free allowances have increased by two per cent … He’d arrived in Collins Street with the confidence of a man twenty years his senior. He didn’t pal around with the younger lads, didn’t do pints after work, didn’t discuss the match on Monday mornings and didn’t seem to take part in any office gossip as far as she could see. He wore his ambition with pride, as a shield that stopped onlookers from guessing what lay underneath.
And he knew everything. Claire knew from experience that Philip Flynn knew absolutely bloody everything. He didn’t show off his knowledge, he wasn’t that stupid. In fact he was polite to a fault, never first to jump in if a question was asked, preferring to quietly volunteer the information, usually when a superior officer had just entered the room. But he was invariably right, that was the annoying thing. Whether he was talking about the password for the new computers, or the recent flight of fancy by the Minister for Justice that had just been passed by government and was only now trickling its way down to the stooges on the ground who’d actually have to do the heavy lifting. He was the first into the office every morning and the last to leave at night. Claire had a vision of him sleeping in a box, a crime-fighting Dracula, emerging each morning with his hair perfectly in place, ready to do it all over again.
Wind bubbled inside her and she willed the burp to stay down as she held her hand out for the notes he was carrying. Saw a look of managed concern on his face and decided she would rip his head off if he asked, in that precise way of his, if she was feeling okay. A side parting. Bloody hell. It wasn’t like the rest of his colleagues were big into fashion. They all kept their hair short and neat. But Flynn looked like he still used Brylcream.
Annoying hair. Hmm, this must be what they meant by pregnancy hormones. She looked up and forced herself to focus.
‘So what did the caller say?’
‘It’s all here.’
Flynn patted the paper in front of him. Completely legible handwriting. Of course. Claire felt her lower back twinge and shifted slightly in the chair, the dart of pain making her even more irritable.
‘I’ll read them in a minute. Tell me what she said.’
And Flynn did so, in a detailed but bored way, as if there were something better he could be doing. In fairness to him, it was a pretty mad story. Some woman had called up talking about internet sites and fake names, personal messages and how it was all connected to the missing woman, or might be. It sounded insane. But she could see the scepticism written all over Flynn’s face and decided out of sheer contrariness, not to give him the satisfaction of agreeing.
‘I’ll take a look, so.’
‘Really?’
He forgot to hide his surprise and Claire took a certain amount of satisfaction from seeing the mask of managed boredom slip.
‘Yeah. Of course. Could be interesting. Have to check all angles, you know? Hand it over.’
She snapped the papers from his hand and nodded in the direction of the door. Noted with satisfaction that he didn’t like being dismissed in that way. His notes were concise, in fact there was very little to add to what he’d already told her, but she took note of the woman’s name anyway. Yvonne Grant. Twenty-eight. The website was called Netmammy apparently. How incredibly naff. Not the sort of thing she could ever see herself using. Claire hadn’t given much thought to maternity leave, but had vague hopes of getting the house painted, maybe finally finishing the garden she and Matt had been ignoring for years. She wouldn’t be wasting her time on the internet …
‘Call on line one.’
Quigley’s voice on the other end of the phone drove every thought of websites and side partings from her mind. A woman’s body. An apartment block on the outskirts of the city centre, on the very edge of the Collins Street jurisdiction. She stood up, the twinge in her back forgotten.
‘On my way.’
As she walked through the office, she paused at Flynn’s desk, feeling mildly guilty about her earlier sharpness.
‘Quigley says you’re to come with me.’
Leaving his papers stacked neatly on the desk, he followed her out the door.