‘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 gangs. 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.’