The Drowned (2 page)

She looked at each of the parents in turn and then she said, ‘I expect Detective Ó Doibhilin and Detective Scanlan have been taking down all the details about your boys – when you saw them last and when you expected them to come home. What they were wearing. Can I ask you if they’ve ever gone missing like this before? Even for just one night?’

‘Well, for one night sometimes, now and then,’ said Mary. ‘But my Tadgh always comes back in the morning wolfing for his breakfast. And he’s never been away for this long without giving me some kind of an explanation for where he’s going, even if I know that it’s not exactly the God’s honest truth.’

‘Every one of the five lads has a mobile phone, as you’d expect,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Not one of them answered any of the calls their parents put in to them yesterday, and today their phones are all stone dead. Mary’s son, Tadgh, never told her his number, so she wasn’t able to ring him, but even when his provider gave us the number and we tried to get through to him there was no response at all.’

‘My Darragh’s stayed out a few times,’ said Brenda. ‘I can’t say that I know where he’s been, or what he’s been up to, and if I ask him all I get is, “Mind your own beeswax, you nosey old cow.” But this is the longest he’s been away without calling even once, if only to tell me that he’s going to be stopping out longer.’

‘They’re grand boys, my Conor and Stevey,’ put in Margaret. ‘They’ve been in bother a few times, but it’s like they can’t help attracting it. I think it’s them being twins. People take advantage because they know that they’ll always look out for each other.’

‘The girls, especially,’ said Jim, their father. ‘As soon as they clap eyes on Conor and Stevey they think,
Hallo – two for the price of one
, like.’

‘You don’t know that, Jim!’ Margaret protested. ‘I always brought them up to have respect for women.’

‘You haven’t overheard them crowing about it,’ said Jim.

‘Anyway,’ said Katie, ‘as soon as Detective Ó Doibhilin and Detective Scanlan have taken all the background details about your boys and a full description, we’ll notify all our officers and make sure that they’re keeping their eyes peeled for them. You’ve fetched in photographs, I hope?’

Detective Scanlan opened up a manila folder to show Katie the pictures the parents had given him. Tadgh, squinting at the sun with a caravan behind him. Aidan, sitting on a wall with a grinning girl with frizzy blonde hair. Darragh, in a bar, with a cigarette in his mouth, holding up a bottle of Satzenbrau and winking. Conor and Stevey, arm in arm, posing with some of their friends in the Peace Park.

Katie looked through them slowly and carefully, trying to assess what kind of boys they were. Their parents would have been surprised how much she was able to learn about them from their clothes and haircuts and the poses they were striking for the camera. Cocky, vain, and not too bright. The sort of lads who had constantly hopped off school and then wondered why they couldn’t land a decent job.

All the same, she couldn’t help thinking that these were all happy pictures. Almost all the photographs that relatives brought in when their loved ones went missing had been taken in brighter times. On holiday, or in pubs, or standing in their rose-filled gardens in the sunshine, with their pet dogs beside them. Cheerful photographs like this always heightened the tragedy when those same smiling people were found half-decomposed in a ditch by the N25, or floating face-down in the river Lee, or dead of an overdose in some tatty mobile home in Gurra, their bellies hugely inflated with hydrogen sulphide gas.

‘Well, I’m pure glad you came to tell us about this so quickly,’ said Katie, closing the folder. ‘For some reason people have the impression that they need to wait at least forty-eight hours before they report anybody missing, but that simply isn’t the case. The sooner we know about it, the better the chance we have of locating them.’

*

Katie went across the road to the Market Tavern for a Cajun chicken wrap and a glass of pineapple juice, as well as a bit of craic with Ken behind the bar.

Ken was constantly nagging her to marry him, ‘I’m a fool for redheads, Katie – especially beautiful redheads with green eyes and the fillum-star figures like yours. If we were married, we could have beautiful red-headed daughters and you could wipe all the penalty points off my driving licence.’

‘Well – if we were married, I wouldn’t have far to walk to work, would I?’ Katie teased him. ‘The only trouble is, Ken, even though you’re the nicest pub landlord in Cork, I don’t actually love you.’

‘Jesus, Katie. You don’t have to be in love to be married. Suppressed hatred, that’s all you need.’

As soon as she returned to her office, Detectives Ó Doibhilin and Scanlan came in to see her with their report on the missing boys.

Detective Ó Doibhilin said, ‘We checked with Sergeant Twomey up at Mayfield and four out of the five lads had form for anti-social behaviour – vandalism, mostly, breaking windows and damaging parked cars. They’ve also been cautioned for hobbling sweets from the local shops, and Darragh O’Connor was caught carrying a knife and being in possession of a small amount of cannabis.’

‘In other words, they’re all typical Mayfield boys,’ said Katie. ‘Is there any indication that any of them are linked to a serious gang?’

‘Not so far as we’ve been able to find out,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘And there are no notifications that any of them have been involved in any major incidents lately.’

‘They gave their families no suggestion that they might be planning to go off somewhere together – like a rock concert in England, maybe, or a football match in Dublin?’

‘Not a hint of that from any of them,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘In fact, Tadgh had made a date to meet his girlfriend this evening, and the twins almost always go bowling on a Thursday night at the Leisureplex on MacCurtain Street.’

‘Then where in the name of God have they gone to?’ said Katie. ‘That Aidan looked tone, you know, as if he really cared about the way he dressed. I can’t see him going for two days without changing his sweater, let alone his undercrackers. But it’s their phones that worry me the most. All five of their phones have gone dead? And they’re
still
dead?’

‘No, you’re spot on there, ma’am,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘Those type of lads carry their phones everywhere and only turn them off to charge them. You can see them standing in the jacks in a pub or a club. They’re straining the praties and still talking at the same time – phone in one hand, you-know-what in the other.’

Katie said, ‘I’ll be liaising, of course, with Superintendent Pearse, but I have the strongest feeling that we need to set up a full-scale search. I want you two to go up to Mayfield and see if you can find any of their pals. Barnavara Crescent would be a good place to start. Talk to their brothers and sisters, too, if they have any. Young lads like that will often confide in their siblings when they wouldn’t dare to tell their parents.’

‘We’ll call into the Garda station, too,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘They may have some idea who the lads have been hanging around with. There’s drug-dealers up there in Mayfield from the city centre sometimes and maybe they’ve got themselves on the wrong side of one of them – not paid their bill or something like that.’

‘None of them were involved with the Provos or the ONH?’

‘Again, not so far as we know. There was no hint at all from their parents that any of them are politically-minded. All they seem to be interested in is drink and uppers and girls.’

‘Okay, grand,’ said Katie. ‘Meanwhile I’ll have the press office put out a missing persons appeal. Five lads like that – Jesus, somebody must know where they are.’

*

To begin with, Detectives Ó Doibhilin and Scanlan went up to Dunnes Stores in Ballyvolane just to make sure that Darragh O’Connor hadn’t turned up for work without telling his mother. The manager solemnly shook his head and said that he hadn’t heard a word from Darragh and if he didn’t show up for work tomorrow, he would tell him his shelf-stacking days were over.

Next, they drove around to all of the boys’ houses to talk to their brothers and sisters. The schools had all broken up the Wednesday before for the Easter break, so most of them were at home, or round at their friends’ houses, or playing in the field at the end of Lotamore Park, so they weren’t too difficult to find. Tadgh’s three brothers and Aidan’s two sulky sisters weren’t too happy about talking to the law, but Darragh’s twelve-year-old brother told them there was no question where Darragh had been going the last time he saw him – to Barnavara Crescent to score some Es.

It was beginning to grow dark as they turned off the Banduff Road into Barnavara Crescent and the street lights were flickering on. They parked and climbed out and walked across the wet grass to the alley, where seven or eight young people were already gathered. It was still raining, but only softly now, more of a persistent mist. The young people were all wearing waterproof jackets with their hoods pulled up, and at least five of them were smoking. There was a pungent smell of marijuana in the air, like a smouldering compost heap.

The young people eyed Detectives Ó Doibhilin and Scanlan as they came closer, but they made no attempt to flick away their joints. The two detectives were wearing windcheaters and jeans and they both looked much younger than they actually were, so they could simply have been a local couple walking along the alley on their way home.

They stopped, however, when they reached the young people and Detective Scanlan said, very clearly, ‘We’re looking for some friends of yours.’

At first, none of the young people spoke, but continued to smoke and stare at them.

Detective Scanlan turned from one to the other. There were two girls there, and five boys. All of them had very pale faces, as if they lived on a diet of chips and marijuana and Monster energy drink. One of the girls was painfully thin, with skinny black tights and wedge-heeled ankle-boots. The other was plump and blonde and bosomy with a splodge of carnation-red lipstick and a silver ring through her nose.

When none of them responded, Detective Ó Doibhilin took out his notebook, flipped it open and read out the missing boys’ names. ‘Conor and Stevey Martin, Darragh O’Connor, Tadgh Buckley and Aidan O’Reilly. When was the last time you saw them?’

‘Who wants to know?’ demanded one of the boys, bigger and older-looking than the rest. He had stubble on his chin and two tattooed teardrops beneath his left eye. ‘Don’t fecking tell me you’re pigs.’

‘You can call us whatever you like, sham,’ said Detective Ó Dobihilin. ‘But five of your pals have been missing now for nearly two days and we’re concerned for their welfare. As you should be, too.’

‘I didn’t know they was missing, did I?’ said the stubble-chinned boy. ‘How in the name of feck was I supposed to know they was missing?’

‘Well, you know now,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘So what we’re asking you is, when was the last time you saw them?’

‘They was all here Tuesday night,’ said the skinny girl, putting up her hand as if she were answering a question in class.

‘Shut your bake, Maeve,’ said the stubble-chinned boy. ‘For all we know, they’re in trouble and these two pigs have come here to lift them.’

‘Jesus, be serious, will you?’ Detective Ó Doibhilin retorted. ‘We wouldn’t be coming here to arrest five people when there’s only the two of us, would we?’

The stubble-chinned boy stood up from the breeze-block garden wall he was sitting on and made a show of shading his eyes with his hand and looking around.

‘For all we know you might have twenty two-bulbs parked around the corner.’

‘Oh, get over yourself, will you?’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Their mums and dads came down to the Garda station in Anglesea Street to report them missing. They’re all worried sick. All of the lads’ mobile phones are dead and so far nobody’s seen hide nor hair of them. We’re not out to arrest them. We just want to make sure they’re alive and well.’

‘That’s what you say,’ said the stubble-chinned boy, sitting back on the wall. He sucked at his joint and then let the smoke leak out of his mouth and up his nostrils.

‘They was all here Tuesday night,’ the skinny girl persisted.

‘Maeve,’ said the stubble-chinned boy. ‘I thought I told you to shut the feck up.’

‘Well you did, but I’m not going to, because I was supposed to be meeting Aidan tonight to go bowling and I haven’t heard a word from him. This lady’s right. His phone’s dead and so’s Darragh’s because I tried to ring him, too.’

‘What time were they here on Tuesday night?’ asked Detective Ó Doibhilin.

‘I don’t know for sure. It must have been after half-past eight because I’d had my tea and changed to come out and
Fair City
had finished.’

‘How long did they stay? We were told they went down to Havana Brown’s that evening.’

‘That’s what they was planning to do, yes. But they came here first because they were meeting this feller who was going to sell them some Es.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Maeve,’ the stubble-chinned boy protested. ‘These are the fecking shades you’re talking to here.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Maeve. ‘What if they’ve had a crash and Aidan and the other lads have gone off the road and they’re upside down in a field and nobody can see them, and they’re all seriously injured, like, and they’re trapped so they can’t get out, but they’re bleeding to death or starving to death?’

‘What in the name of God are you blethering about?’ said the stubble-chinned boy. ‘There’s no fecking fields around here they could be upside down in. For feck’s sake.’

‘It happened to that woman and her daughter in Fermoy, didn’t it, only last week? And they both died.’

‘That field was under a metre of water, you gomie lackeen, you.’

Detective Scanlan went across and sat on the wall next to Maeve and said gently, ‘So... they came here first to buy some Es. Why didn’t they simply go down to the city and buy them there?’

‘Because there’s a feller comes here regular and gives them a bargain price, that’s why.’

‘Holy St Joseph and all the fecking carpenters,’ said the stubble-chinned boy, blowing out smoke. ‘How to be a snitch in one easy lesson.’