WE GO BACK to Ballykilleen to speak to Brian.
We leave Sylvie waiting in the car with picture books and a packet of potato chips. I stand where I can see the car. I wave, but all I can see is the top of her head.
Brian doesn’t seem at all surprised to see us.
“You two again? Well, that was quick,” he says.
“Brian.” I swallow hard. “We didn’t quite tell you the truth, the time we came before. As you suspected.”
He nods, waits for me to go on.
“Why we came to see you—why we came here at all—it’s because of my daughter,” I tell him. “Because of Sylvie. There’s something wrong, and we don’t know what. She sometimes gets very upset.” I clear my throat. The words are hard to form. “And we think, well, that it’s possible—that she could be remembering a previous life.”
He raises one skeptical eyebrow. “Well, that’s a new one on me, Grace.”
I feel the heat in my face.
“It’s why we asked about Flag Cottage. She seemed to get so excited when she saw it, she keeps saying she lived there before . . . Adam’s a researcher, he works at a university.” I hope that saying this will give us a more respectable air.
To my relief, he doesn’t laugh or immediately dismiss what I’ve said. He muses on this for a moment.
“To be honest, I’m not the kind of man who goes in for that kind of thing. You die and there’s an end of it, that’s how I see it,” he says. “But the fact is, in this line of work you need an open mind.” He leans a little toward us. His elbows are resting on the desk, his long hands wedged in his thatch of thick pale hair. “Some forces use psychics, of course. When they can’t get a lead on a case. It’s done a lot more often than the public might suppose. Well, you’ll know about that from your researches, Adam . . .”
Adam nods.
“So let’s push the boat out,” says Brian. “Let’s imagine that your little girl is really onto something. Talk me through that.”
“There’s a place we’ve driven past,” I tell him. “Driving to Coldharbour from here, where the road turns away from the coast. There’s a big oak tree and a track that leads off the road. It looks like there’s an old quarry there.”
“That’s Gaviston Pits,” says Brian. “They’ve quarried there for centuries. Dreary spot, I always think.”
“Sylvie keeps being sick when we pass it. It’s happened twice now. Always at just the same place.”
“Poor little kid,” says Brian with ready empathy.
“And we wondered if something had happened there—maybe a crime or something?”
He shakes his head. “The only major crime round here has been Alice’s disappearance. If it was a crime, that is. And her car was found ten miles away, on the road going south out of Coldharbour. There’s nothing at all to link Alice with Gaviston Pits.”
I don’t say anything. I feel a little drag of disappointment.
“So I guess we’ve got ourselves a mystery here,” he tells us. “Kids can get frightened of anything, of course. When my Amy was little, she had a thing about feathers. Oh, and those hot-air dryers you get in public lavatories. Absolutely terrified.”
“But there’s water at Gaviston Pits,” I say. “And she told us this thing . . .” My voice sounds thin and hollow. “She said she died in water.” Something unreadable moves over Brian’s face when I say this. “She couldn’t tell us where it was. But we saw the water at Gaviston Pits. You could drown—or hide a body.”
“You’re thinking, if it was suicide, that maybe Alice drowned herself and Jessica there?”
“We wondered.”
He shakes his head.
“She’d never have managed to get from the road to the water. The sides are too steep, she’d never have found a way down.”
“There’s a path down the side,” says Adam. “It isn’t all that difficult.”
Brian is surprised. “You’ve been there?”
“Yes,” says Adam.
Brian doesn’t say anything.
I glance toward Sylvie. The car is steaming up; she’s drawing faces on the window. She’s restless. Soon she’ll come and get us. I’m trying to remember all the things we need to say.
“We talked about it with Brigid—you know, at St. Vincent’s,” I say.
“Yes, I know Brigid,” he says.
“And Brigid was hinting that people suspected Gordon. That Gordon used to beat Alice up.”
Brian’s mouth is tight. “People can suspect all they like. But Gordon was out of the frame. He was on the road in Limerick when Alice disappeared. We saw the hotel register.”
“And what about Marcus Paul?” I say. “I mean, Alice worked for Marcus. And Brigid said they were close . . .”
Brian is shaking his head even before I’ve finished.
“His alibi checked out,” he says. “Marcus was in Galway on the day it happened, with Brigid, at the races. In the VIP tent, most likely, guzzling lots of champagne. Lucky beggars. You’ll have met Marcus, of course?”
“Sort of. Well no, not really,” I say, then think how stupid this sounds. I see Adam glance at me, startled.
“Marcus—well, he’s one of those men—how to put it? Marcus knows how the world works.” I can hear the respect in Brian’s voice. “It all looks so easy for Marcus, he wears his life like it’s tailored just for him.” I think of the man I saw in the bar—his patrician air, his rather proprietorial gaze. This seems an apt description. “You’ve probably seen his house from the road. Kinvara House. Finest house in the county, that.”
Sylvie is beckoning through the car window. She thinks we’re taking too long.
“This quarry—Gaviston Pits,” says Adam. “Did you search it after Alice and Jessica disappeared?”
“Well, not as such,” says Brian. “There really wasn’t a reason to.”
“Could you search it now?” I ask him. “Would you consider doing that?”
He smiles indulgently at me. “Sorry, Grace. The case is closed. It’s cost us hundreds of thousands already, with nothing to show for it—no result, nothing.”
“But, if they might be under there . . .”
He shakes his head. “It isn’t that easy,” he says.
Adam looks rather deliberately toward Brian’s desk and the photos of his children.
“Jessica Murphy was just the same age as your daughter Amy, you said.”
He’s trying to speak so casually, but I see the urgency in his face, the little lines between his brows, as sharp as though cut with a blade.
Brian nods. “There are cases that really get to you,” he tells us. “And this one got to me. I remember how it happened. It was when the family gave me a list of the things that Jessica had on. I remember the items even now. Trainers with air bubbles in the soles, and those bits of jewelry they go for—lockets and bracelets and so on—and an *NSYNC sweatshirt. Exactly like the things my Amy wore.”
“It must really bring it home to you,” says Adam.
Brian nods. “Yes, it does that . . . Look, I might just take myself off and have a snoop around Gaviston Pits. Considering what you told me . . .”