I’m already ripping open the envelope. Steve pulls his chair towards mine – casually, checking his phone for messages at the same time, nothing important going on here.
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.’