A uniformed garda brings us into the lift and presses the button for the fifth floor. Normally Finn would roar about pressing the button himself, but he stays quiet, intimidated by the uniformed man standing silently beside us, and I gently squeeze his hand as the lift starts to rise. Chills sweep down my arms. My clothes, a striped navy jumper and jeans, weekend clothes, feel too cheerful, too casual, especially when the lift doors open to a detective waiting for us in a tailored black suit.
“Hello,” he says. “Detective Inspector Byrne.” I have to drop Finn’s hand to shake the detective’s, and my son protests, clinging to my leg. The detective is taller than me, with blond hair combed back from his head and skin fair enough to show reddish shave marks on his jaw. He stops outside an interview room. “Garda Maguire will mind the children.”
“No, they’re staying with me,” I say, wheeling the pram through the doorway before the detective can argue, and moving one of the chairs over to the window for Finn. I crouch in front of him, whispering, “Do you want to watch a show on my phone?” He nods. “Yes, good man.” I slip my headphones over his ears and play Octonauts for him. Saoirse is happy enough in her pram for now, angled toward me, staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling tiles.
The detective gives the sergeant a look over my head, then closes the door and sits down across the table from me. When he thanks me for coming in, his voice has a strange quality to it, like he’s pitching it for a much larger room. Something about the rise and fall of the words makes me think he’s had voice training, and I wonder if he has to speak at press conferences or if he wants to be the chief commissioner one day. The coaching wasn’t for interviews like this, surely. I want to ask him to speak more softly, to keep the baby calm.
“The Wicklow Mountain Rescue Team is on its way to Glendalough to look for your sister. To better assist them, I’d like to get a sense from you of what’s been going on with Marian recently,” he says, and nerves prickle through my body. Listening to him, I make a bargain with myself to tell the detective about Royce in one hour, if Marian is still missing. Telling the gardaí might only put us in worse danger, but there are no good options here. “How’s your sister’s health?”
“Good. She’s barely sleeping, though. She had a baby six months ago,” I say. The detective doesn’t seem to consider sleep deprivation a risk factor, which means he has never been up every two hours with an infant. The other week, I watched Marian sing Saoirse a lullaby, so exhausted she was leaning over the crib, her forehead resting on her arm, her eyes closed.
“And Marian’s nursing,” I say, but the detective’s face stays blank. “She didn’t bring a pump with her. She’ll be in pain, going this long without nursing. She might get a fever or mastitis. Something’s wrong, she’d never be this late on purpose.”
He nods, without seeming to absorb the information. “We haven’t had a frost yet, luckily. With the damp, though, she’ll be at risk of hypothermia,” he says, and I stare at him.
“But the rescue team will find her soon, right? Since they know her route.”
“Camaderry includes complicated terrain,” he says. “You’ve rough ground, cliffs. These searches aren’t always straightforward, even if the team knows the hiker’s planned route. The average search-and-rescue in Wicklow lasts fourteen hours.”
I hear the air leave my body. Marian will have run out of water by then, she will be in pain, she will be cold. The mountains will grow dark in a couple of hours, and she will be alone then in the darkness.
“How would you describe your sister’s state of mind recently?” asks the detective. “Has she taken well to motherhood?”
“Yes. She’s crazy about her daughter.”
“Any postnatal depression?” he asks, and I pause before answering. Marian would hate for me to tell him any of this, but the detective has already caught me hesitating. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he says. “It’s normal.”
“I know it’s normal,” I say.
“So Marian has been depressed?”
“No, not anymore. She had trouble at first, but anyone would have done. Her daughter was born eight weeks early, after a placental abruption. She spent her first thirty-eight days in a neonatal intensive care unit,” I say. Marian was beside herself, out of her head. She was convinced the abruption was her fault, that already she’d failed to protect her baby. “That was in the spring, though. She’s grand now.”
The detective scratches the razor burn on his jaw. He looks like the sort of man you see in the expensive restaurants on Dawson Street, or smoking a cigar outside the Horseshoe Bar.
“Has Marian ever talked about harming herself?” he asks, and I glance at Finn, but he’s absorbed in his show. Past his small shape, I can see construction cranes out the window, and the dark ink spots of crows turning in the air.
“No. She’d never leave her family, she’s not a danger to herself.”
“Everyone can be a danger to themselves, unfortunately,” he says. “I understand these questions can be difficult, but I need you to answer them honestly. The rescue team searches for someone differently if they’ve been despondent. They check certain areas of the mountain first.”
“Marian hasn’t been despondent.”
“Would she tell you?”
“Yes.”
The detective’s eyes are a very bright blue, aquamarine. He considers me, and I wonder what he sees. A tired, ordinary woman in her thirties, dark eyes, dark hair that could use a cut.
“Is Marian working currently?” he asks.
“She’s an air-ambulance paramedic,” I say with pride. “They’re based out of the hospital in Tallaght.”
“Is she in debt?”
“No,” I say, stung. I’d expected another question about Marian’s work. “She’s not exactly minting it, but she’s fine.”
“And her home life? Any trouble in her marriage?” asks the detective.
“They adore each other.”
“So no arguments recently?”
“I never said that. Seb shaved his beard over the sink the other day. You should have seen Marian, absolutely raging.”
The detective leans back against his chair, and I say, “Marian didn’t hurt herself, I swear.”
“Has Marian been acting differently recently?” asks the detective. “It could be something small. A change in her routine. A new friend, a new hobby.”
“Marian works and has a baby. When’s she finding the time for a hobby?”
“Well, she goes hiking, that’s a hobby.”
“You think walking’s a hobby?” I ask, and the detective smiles, like he has nothing but patience for me. He won’t lose his temper, not yet anyway.
“There’s also a chance,” says the detective, “a very slight chance, that someone else is involved. We’re checking the registry of known offenders in the area.”
The phrase confuses me, that the police already know about certain men, men who should never be left alone with a woman. Why are they living here? I want to ask. If you knew about a man my sister should never come across alone on a hiking path, why is he here?
“Given what you told us about Marian being an informer, we are also investigating the possibility of paramilitary involvement.”
Sensation rushes up my legs, like I’m leaning over a high balcony. If I tell the detective about Royce, the police will arrest him, and the IRA will punish us. Royce probably isn’t involved anyway. He hadn’t sounded like he was lying to me on the phone, but I could be wrong. Or it could be someone else from the IRA besides Royce, someone with a vendetta against her. It could be Niall, directing others from inside prison.
If the IRA or the loyalists are involved, I will need a force to match theirs, I will need an army, too. Patrol cars, dogs, an armed unit. It might already be too late, an IRA executioner might have already shot Marian and left her bleeding into the mountain.
“Over the past few days, has Marian seemed uneasy, or frightened?”
I hesitate, then say, “I don’t know.” Maybe something happened, maybe Royce went to see her. I remember Marian’s hands shaking as she screwed the cap on a bottle, the shadows under her eyes. Would I have been able to tell the difference between exhaustion and fear? Same pounding heart, same dry mouth, unsteady nerves. With Finn at that age, the fatigue made me feel hunted.
By now, the mountain rescue team will be climbing the moor above Glendalough, the searchers spread out across the heather. They will be shouting her name. The rescue helicopter will be beating through the air above them, searching the cliffs and the rough land. Marian might have fallen. She might be lying on the rocky ground, but she’ll hear the searchers soon and shout back to them.
The baby starts to fuss, and I lift her from the pram, holding her against me. I can feel her bobbing her head above my shoulder. She still has on the strawberry-print romper Marian dressed her in this morning, and I spread my hand across her back, feeling the soft weave of the fabric.
“How did Marian become an informer?” asks the detective. “She’s a paramedic, how did she have any access to paramilitary information?”
“Marian was in the IRA.”
The detective’s blue eyes sharpen. It takes me a moment to understand the change in his expression, in the atmosphere in the room. At first I think he’s angry, before realizing that he is excited and trying to disguise it. He had been bored before, running through the motions, feeling sorry for himself for having to work on a Saturday on the disappearance of some sad woman who couldn’t cope with having a baby and was probably off crying her eyes out somewhere up a mountain, wasting everyone’s time.
The detective does not look bored anymore. He leans forward over the table. “For how long?”
“Seven years.”
“Which brigade?”
“Belfast.”
“What was her role?” he asks, and I say, “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. If the IRA is involved in her disappearance, we need to know about Marian’s background,” he says.
“Her unit did mostly fundraising and industrial sabotage. They bombed power stations.” Marian would spend eight hours at a farmhouse on the River Bann, assembling a charge of Semtex or gelignite and a detonator.
I look away from the detective, out the window, sliding my hand along my neck, under my collar, trying to loosen the fabric from my skin. I say, “They always called in a warning first. No one was ever hurt.”
“Is that what she told you?” he says. “Can I ask you something, Tessa? Do you trust her?”