The note says, Hiya Conway, file on your missing guy. Word of advice as a mate, no back seat driving OK? You don’t like anything keep your big gob shut. I did a bit on the case so any questions give me a ring. GO’R
‘Huh?’ Steve says. ‘Keep your gob shut about what?’
‘No clue.’ I stick the letter in my pocket, for the shredder. ‘Might make sense once we’ve had a look through that lot.’
We read the initial report together, me keeping one eye on the room to see if any of the floaters are looking interested. The lead D was a guy called Feeney; I saw his name on old paperwork when I was in Missing Persons, but he retired years before I came on board. He’s probably dead by now. If we need the inside scoop, we’ll just have to hope Gary’s got it.
In 1998, Desmond Joseph Murray was thirty-three years old, a taxi driver, living in Greystones and working out of Dublin city centre. The photos attached to the file show a slight guy, medium height, with neat brown hair and a sweet, lopsided smile. I barely clocked him in Aislinn’s photo albums. So busy staring at her and hoping her face would trigger my memory, I missed what was right in front of me.
There’s one family shot in there. The wife was small, dark, groomed and good-looking; very good-looking, in the big-eyed, pouty, helpless way that makes me want to heave. And there’s Aislinn, with her too-tight plaits and a big grin, snuggled into the circle of her father’s arm.
‘You know who he reminds me of?’ Steve says. ‘Our boy Rory.’
I tilt the photo my way. He’s right; they don’t look alike, exactly, but they’re definitely the same type. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I say. ‘What a bleeding cliché. How badly did that stupid bitch need to get a grip?’
‘She was trying to. Give her credit for that, at least.’
Clouds are building up, making the light at the windows shift and heave; the incident room feels precarious and at risk, a ship on a bad sea or an island house with a storm coming in. Something – that light, maybe, or Steve’s quiet voice dissipating out through all the empty space, fading to nothing before it can reach the walls – something makes the words sound, out of nowhere, massively sad. I don’t feel like giving Aislinn credit for anything, or like giving a fuck about her except in terms of basic professional pride, but just for that moment everything about her seems dense enough with sadness to drop you like a sandbag.
I say, ‘What I think of her doesn’t matter. Read.’
Just after three in the afternoon of the fifth of February, Desmond left home in his taxi to follow his usual Thursday routine: pick up his nine-year-old daughter Aislinn from school, drop her home, then head into Dublin to work until the closing-time crowds died down around one in the morning. He picked up Aislinn and dropped her off according to plan. That was the last his family saw of him.
Around four in the morning his wife Evelyn woke up, realised he wasn’t there and started to worry. Desmond had a mobile phone, but he wasn’t answering it; at six she rang the taxi company he worked for, but he didn’t answer their radio either. At ten in the morning she rang the local uniforms. The initial report said ‘informant was distressed’, which is code for ‘freaking the fuck out’. The local guys checked hospitals and stations, found nothing, and told her Desmond was probably taking a bit of time to himself and would be back by evening. When he wasn’t, and the informant had got distressed enough that her doctor had to come round and give her a sedative, they called in Missing Persons.
‘Matches Lucy’s story,’ Steve says. He scoops a thick wad of dusty paper out of the box, hands half of it to me and slides over to his own side of the desk.
‘So far,’ I say. ‘Remember: go fast.’
Steve starts skimming. I swing my feet up on the desk and have a quick discreet scan of the room, over paper, but none of the floaters are looking our way; all of them are working away, busy as good little schoolkids, in the uneasy light.
Evelyn’s statement swore the marriage was wonderful, childhood sweethearts living their happy-ever-after; the paper is gooey with how he still brought her red roses and told her every day that she was the love of his life. It sounds like bollix to me, but the neighbours didn’t contradict her – no one had ever heard them arguing, nothing like that. The financial records came up clean: Desmond and Evelyn weren’t rich, but they weren’t broke, either. Their parents had left enough, between them, to pay off most of the Murrays’ mortgage and Desmond’s taxi licence – and those went for anything up to a hundred grand, back then. There were no other debts; the current account had no suspiciously large deposits and no weird withdrawals to say someone had been buying coke or hitting the betting shops. Desmond had no history of mental illness. He had no criminal record – a few speeding tickets, few parking tickets, what you’d expect from a taxi man. His friends said he was a happy guy, outgoing, worked hard and liked his work, had no enemies and wasn’t the type to make any. Their version of the marriage didn’t match Evelyn’s – according to them, Evelyn basically kept Des prisoner, never wanted to do anything but cried for days if he did anything without her, freaked out if he didn’t answer his mobile fast enough – but none of them had ever heard Des say anything about leaving her, although most of them figured he was just sticking around for the kid and would be out of there the day she left home. This case isn’t sounding like a full box’s worth of mystery to me. I spot Gary’s signature, neater and younger-looking than the one I’m used to, at the bottom of a sheet.
‘Statement from Aislinn,’ Steve says. ‘Look.’
It’s signed in careful, round kid-writing. The day Desmond went missing, he and Aislinn didn’t talk much on the drive home from school; she had a homework assignment that she didn’t understand and she was worried about getting in trouble if she couldn’t do it, so she was mainly thinking about that. She didn’t notice anything odd about her da, but it sounded like she wouldn’t have anyway. The only thing that stood out to her was his goodbye, when he pulled up in front of their gate and she opened the car door to get out. He told her he loved her and to be a good girl, same as always; but then he pulled her over to him, gave her a hug – not part of their routine – and told her to look after her mammy. He watched her to the house and he was still there, waving, when she closed the door.
‘There’s your answer right there,’ Steve says. ‘The guy did a runner.’
‘Yeah, he did. So what’s the rest of this shite?’ I nod at the cardboard box, which is still maybe a third full. This is where I would expect the file to end. Grown man, no reason to kill himself, no history of mental illness, no enemies, a pretty obvious goodbye to his kid: normally you would send one last press release to the media and assume he’s gone because he wants to be and he’ll come home in his own good time, or not.
Only Missing Persons didn’t stop there. They pulled Desmond’s mobile records – which took a few weeks: mobiles weren’t big back then, Ds didn’t have contacts in the phone companies, so they had to go through the official channels – and tracked down everyone he’d contacted in months. Most of the numbers turned out to be either his mates or his regular taxi customers, ringing Desmond direct instead of going through the dispatcher, and they were all able to account for their whereabouts at the time of his disappearance.
The question was why anyone had asked them to. Missing Persons is chronically short on manpower, same as every other squad; normally they put it into the custody-dispute toddler or the walkabout Alzheimer’s granny, not the midlife crisis. I say, ‘The way they worked it. Does that seem off to you?’
Steve says, ‘They were very bloody thorough.’
‘Yeah. Getting alibis off his customers? They worked this like they thought it was a murder.’
‘If Des Murray was on the radar for gang-related activity, even minor stuff, they would’ve pushed the case all the way. In case he was getting to be a liability, and someone gave him two in the back of the head and dumped him up the mountains.’
‘I haven’t found anything that points to gang
s. You?’
Steve shakes his head. ‘Me neither. They might not have put it in the file, though.’
Which is true enough. If Feeney didn’t feel like handing over his case to Organised Crime, he would have kept any gang-related ideas to himself, same as we have. I say, ‘Keep reading.’
Des Murray’s cab showed up on a side street in Dún Laoghaire, which moved suicide a couple of notches up the list – Dún Laoghaire has nice long convenient piers – except that there was no note in the taxi. No signs of a struggle, either, and no robbery: there was thirty-four quid, which matched the afternoon’s fares on the meter, tucked down by the gearstick. If Des had done a runner, he had left his wife and kid every penny he could.
The tip line rings; Stanton dives for it, listens, and explains that we don’t think Aislinn Murray was ordering a vodka and diet Coke in a club in Waterford last night, on account of her deadness, but thanks for calling. A couple of the other floaters snort, down at their desks. No one looks up.
‘Whoa,’ Steve says – quietly, but the note in his voice snaps my head up. ‘Here we go.’
I shove my foot off the desk, spin my chair over to his side. ‘Let’s see.’
It’s a report on another of the contacts off Desmond Murray’s phone. The number was a mobile registered to a Vanessa O’Shaughnessy, but it took the Ds a while to track her down. This turned out to be because she had left the country. She had taken a boat to England, on the sixth of February.
‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘Bet that got everyone’s attention.’ It definitely gets mine. The ferry to England leaves from Dún Laoghaire.
Steve flips pages: report on Vanessa O’Shaughnessy. We skim fast. She was twenty-eight, a dental nurse, sharing a house in Dublin with a couple of other women. The photo shows a freckly redhead with a wicked, vivid grin – nowhere near the looker Evelyn was, but I’m betting you’d get a lot more crack out of Vanessa. Almost two years before Desmond Murray went missing, she had started ringing or texting him every Sunday afternoon. According to her flatmates, he had brought her to visit her ma, who had Parkinson’s disease and was in a nursing home somewhere in West Dublin with no bus service, and they had agreed to make it a regular gig. The actual texts, once they came in from the phone company, bore that out: Hi des, vanessa here, just checking are you still ok to pick me up at 3? . . . Hi vanessa, yes i’ll be there, see you then.
After a few months, the phone calls and texts started getting more frequent – twice a week, three times, then almost every day. The flatmates said Vanessa’s ma had been getting sicker, so Vanessa had been visiting her more often. There was still nothing incriminating in the texts. Hi, are we still on for tomorrow evening? and Yes please, I’ll be ready at 7. The odd smiley face; nothing more intimate than that.
‘All business,’ Steve says.
‘It would be, either way. The wife knew he had a mobile. And she sounds like the type who’d check it.’
On the second of January, five weeks before Des Murray went missing, Vanessa’s ma died. After the funeral, she told her housemates and her boss that she was ditching her job and moving to England, for a fresh start. On the sixth of February, she was gone and so was Des.
Report from the nursing home, saying Vanessa’s ma had died unexpectedly, hadn’t been getting worse over the last while, and Vanessa had never visited more than twice a week. Missing Persons called in a favour from someone’s pal in England, who found out that Desmond Murray had applied for a taxi licence in Liverpool. Then they called in another favour from someone’s pal in Liverpool, who went to Murray’s address and verified that he was alive and well and shacked up with Vanessa O’Shaughnessy. And that’s the end of the file.
‘Surprise, surprise,’ I say. ‘Some guy got bored of his wife and swapped her for a newer model. No gangs there. And nothing to do with our case, either, as far as I can see.’
Steve says, ‘But why didn’t Missing Persons tell the family? Aislinn hadn’t a clue about any of this. Why didn’t they just say it to Evelyn Murray at the time?’
If you track down a missing person and he wants you to say nothing – and plenty of them do – then you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut. Normally, though, you make sure the general idea gets across, if only because you don’t want it on your conscience when some rent boy’s ma ODs on her Valium because she’s convinced a serial killer got him. This is exactly the kind of case that should have got a carefully worded hint – Obviously we can’t release details of the investigation, Mrs Murray, but I can tell you that we don’t expect to be asking you to identify a body . . . For some reason, Feeney and his boys decided not to go there.
‘Unless,’ Steve says. ‘Unless there was something dodgy going on, and the Ds were protecting the family.’
‘Or maybe they did tell the wife, and she didn’t pass it on to the kid.’
‘For fifteen years? Even when the kid was a grown adult? When she was desperate to find out what had happened to her da?’
I shrug. ‘People are weird. You heard Lucy: the ma was ashamed that her husband was gone. Maybe she was too ashamed to tell her daughter why.’
Steve is licking his finger and flipping back through his pile of paper, occasionally pulling out a page or two to add to a stack on his desk. ‘Nah. That note from your mate, about the back-seat driving? This is what he meant: the Ds didn’t tell the family, and if you think they should’ve, keep that to yourself.’
‘I do think the Ds should’ve told the family. It would’ve saved us a shitload of time and hassle.’
Steve glances up at that. ‘They should’ve told the family, full stop. Even if there was dodgy stuff in the background, they should have dropped a hint that he was alive.’
‘Maybe.’ I start tapping my half of the file back into a stack. ‘I’ll ring Gary, ask him what the story was.’
‘You don’t think they should’ve?’
‘I don’t know. Do I look like the Pope to you? Fancy moral decisions aren’t my job.’
‘What would you have done if it was your case? Would you have kept your mouth shut? Seriously?’
‘I would’ve transferred to Murder. Where this kind of shite doesn’t come up.’
‘I’d’ve told them,’ Steve says. I go to dump my paper back in the box; he takes it off me, adds it to his and keeps flipping. ‘No question. Aislinn’s own da? Your woman’s husband? They had a right to know. If they’d known what they were dealing with, it might not have messed up their lives, or anyway not as much.’
I’m pulling out my phone, but that brings my head round. ‘Yeah? Because what? Unless they know where Daddykins is, they’ve got no choice except to lock themselves in the gaff and sit around obsessing about him? There’s no way they could get on with their lives, no?’
It comes out with more edge than I meant it to. Steve stops messing with paper. ‘Come on. I didn’t say that. Just . . . if they’re spending half their time waiting for the da to walk back in the door, and the other half picturing him dumped someplace up the mountains, then yeah, their heads are gonna be wrecked.’
I dial Gary’s number and keep an eye on the door for Breslin. ‘Then they shouldn’t have spent their time like that. The Ds didn’t force them to. Get a hobby. Knit something.’
Steve starts to say, carefully, ‘I don’t think it’s—’ but I hold up a finger: the phone’s ringing.
Voicemail again. I refuse to start worrying about why Gary doesn’t want to talk to me. ‘Hey, Gary, it’s Antoinette. We got the stuff; thanks. We’ve had a look; your guy can pick it up any time.’ I’m not about to hand that box over to any of our floaters. ‘And give me a ring when you get a chance, yeah? I’ve just got a couple of follow-up questions, and I’d rather run them past you than go chasing anyone else. Talk then.’
I hang up. ‘If he doesn’t want me hassling the original Ds, that should get his attention. And if there was anything dodgy going on, he’ll let me know, to make me quit poking around.’
‘This is all th
e main stuff,’ Steve says, holding up the stack of pages he’s pulled out of the file. ‘I want photocopies. Just in case.’ He sweeps a handful of random paper off his desk, shoves the statements into the middle and heads off at a casual lope, no hurry, nothing worth noticing here.
I kick the file box under our desk, till Gary can send the crap-suit kid to pick it up. There’s no reason Breslin shouldn’t see it – there’s nothing to see, as far as we can tell – but I don’t want him to. I tell myself that’s just good sense, no matter what: if there’s nothing in the file, I don’t need Breslin giving us flak for wasting our time. Then I spread out Rory’s financials again and pretend to be fascinated by them, for the benefit of Breslin’s pocket poodle, whoever that is.
My instincts are good – not bragging: every D’s are, specially every D who makes it as far as Murder – and I know how to use them. They’ve come through for me when all the solid detective work in the world would have run me into a brick wall. But this time they’re being bugger-all use. Not that they’re out of commission – every sensor is firing wildly, red lights flashing, beeping noises everywhere – but they just keep sweeping, can’t pin anything down. Rory’s keeping something back, but I can’t tell whether it’s the murder or not; Breslin’s fucking with us, but I can’t figure out why. I feel like I’m missing the bleeding obvious here, but the harder I concentrate, the more all the signals turn to noise. Something is scrambling them.
Another D, one with more experience than me, would be well able to do that. The other thing Ds are good at, as well as using their own instincts: wrecking other people’s. Suspects don’t make mistakes because they’re morons, or at least not all of them. They make mistakes because we know how to baffle them into it.
Someone wants me to make a mistake. And I’m a couple of hundred miles out to sea with all my systems going haywire.
That doesn’t faze me too much, not in itself. Danger isn’t the thing scrambling my signals; it’s the only thing keeping me clear-headed enough that I have a chance of navigating my way out of this. I watch Steve, heading back between the desks with a brand-new blue folder sticking out from his handful of random paperwork, and I really hope he works the same way.