When the girl in the crap suit hovered in the doorway, I put the sandwich away and gave her just the right smile and ‘Can I help you?’, not pushy, just warm and encouraging. It worked: she dumped her whole story on my desk.
Her dad, such a lovely sweet wonderful man, how he taught her to play chess and he took her to Powerscourt waterfall in his taxi and he could make her giggle till she got the hiccups. The day she came downstairs in her school uniform and her mother was frantically ringing her dad’s mobile for the hundredth time, He never got home last night I can’t find him oh Jesus Mary and Joseph I know he’s dead . . . The detectives who took statements and made reassuring noises about how most missing people come home within a few days, just need a bit of time to themselves. The few days turning into weeks and still no sign of SuperDaddy, the detectives’ visits getting further apart and their reassuring noises getting vaguer. The one who finally patted her on the head and said, You have great memories of him; we don’t want to change that, do we? Sometimes these things are better left as they are.
‘That has to mean he knew something, don’t you think it . . . ? Or at least he had an idea, even just an idea – doesn’t it sound like that to you, like he knew what . . . ?’
Her leaning in across my desk, fingers woven together so tight the knuckles were white. Me shrugging, blank-faced: ‘I wouldn’t be able to speculate on the detective’s thought process. Sorry.’
So she kept going. The weeks turning into months into years; jumping a mile every time the phone rang, spending every birthday waiting for the postman to bring a card. The nights listening to her mother crying on and on. The times she was sure she spotted him walking down the street, nearly leaped out of her skin before the guy turned his head and was some randomer and she was left gasping and paralysed, watching the one moment she wanted from the world dissolve to dust and blow away. One look at my face should have told her this was getting her nowhere, but she kept on going.
You get that, in Missing Persons: people who think seeing their faces, hearing them cry, will make you do your job better. You get parents who come in every year, on the anniversary of the day their kid disappeared, to find out if you have even one new scrap of info. It sort of works: you keep track of the anniversary, put in a few extra hours when it’s coming up, do your damnedest to find something to give them. This chick was a whole other story. I had zero intention of busting my arse trying to help her find Daddy.
Which is what I told her, in a slightly more tactful way, wondering how hard I would have to blank her before she would fuck off out of my face. Files can’t be released, Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to police investigations, sorry, can’t help you.
And of course then she whipped out the tears. Please couldn’t you just look up the file, you can’t imagine what it’s like growing up without yada yada yada, and some Hollywood-style puke about needing to know the truth so it couldn’t control her life any more – I can’t swear she actually used the words ‘closure’ and ‘empowered’, because I’d stopped listening, but they would have fit right in. By that stage my happy buzz was well and truly wrecked. All I wanted was to shut the bitch up and kick her out the door.
Aislinn wasn’t looking for a daddy substitute. She was looking for Daddy.
I say, ‘Aislinn’s da didn’t just walk out on them; he went missing. She came in to Missing Persons looking for info. I was on the desk.’
‘Huh,’ Steve says, thinking that over. ‘“Just gone,” Lucy said, remember? I never copped that meant missing. What’d you give Aislinn?’
‘I gave her fuck-all. She was whinging at me, could I not look up the file and tell her what was in there, pretty please . . .’ I feel it all over again, the rush of anger rising up from my gut and flaring under my ribs. I shove myself away from the lamppost and start walking. ‘I gave her the name of one of the older guys who would’ve been on the squad back then, told her to come back on his shift, pointed her at the door.’
Steve has to lengthen his stride to keep up with me. ‘Did she? Come back?’
‘I didn’t ask. Didn’t give a shite.’
‘Did you have a look at her da’s file?’
‘No, I didn’t. What part of “didn’t give a shite” isn’t getting through to you?’
Steve ignores the bite in my voice. He dodges a yapping clump of Uggs and buggies and says, ‘I’d love to see that file.’
That gets my attention. ‘You think there’s a link? Her da going missing, her getting killed?’
‘I think that’s a lot of bad shite to happen to one family just by coincidence.’
‘I’ve seen worse.’ I’m not sure I want this case to turn out interesting, not any more.
‘If we’re thinking about the gangster-boyfriend thing—’
It feels like the whole of Stoneybatter is yammering at me: WE WON’T PAY spray-painted on a patched garage door, woman laughing hysterically about butter from a bus-shelter ad, an old one from my street waving at me across the road – I wave back and speed up, before she heads over for a chat. ‘We’ve got no evidence the gangster boyfriend ever existed. Remember? You made him up.’
‘Yeah, but if. Go with it for a second. I’ll owe you the quid.’
I don’t laugh. ‘Whatever.’
‘Say Aislinn thought some gang was involved in disappearing her da. And say she didn’t get any satisfaction out of Missing Persons.’ Steve’s being tactful. He means, say some bitch gave her the brush-off.
‘Why the hell would she think that? She didn’t say anything about gangs to me. She was all about how perfect Daddy was; she’d have lost the plot if I’d suggested he ever had a parking ticket. And the gang boys don’t waste their time disappearing normal decent citizens.’
‘Maybe she didn’t know that. We know she was na?ve; maybe she thought gangs were like the villains in stories, going around looking to grab people just out of badness. Or maybe she found out the da wasn’t as much of a saint as she thought. There are normal decent citizens who get mixed up with gangs.’
I say, reluctantly, ‘I think he was a taxi driver.’
The gang lads love getting taxi drivers on side. All their own cars are on watch lists, under surveillance half the time, occasionally bugged. A taxi man can ferry drugs, guns, money, people, all under the radar.
‘There you go,’ Steve says triumphantly, on it like a puppy on a treat. ‘He gets tangled up with the bad boys, puts a foot wrong, ends up in the mountains with two in the back of the head. Missing Persons can’t prove it, but they know the story, and when Aislinn talks to your mate he lets something slip. She decides to do a bit of her own investigating; before she knows it, she’s in way over her head . . .’
‘Her bookshelf,’ I say. I’d rather keep my mouth shut and hope this whole bloody thing will go away, but I suppose Steve’s earned his extra treat. ‘Book on missing persons, right next to the one on Irish gangland crime. Both of them full of underlining.’