12
In the morning we started trying to trace a Sandra or Alexandra Something who had lived in or near Knocknaree in 1984. It was one of the more frustrating mornings of my life. I rang the census bureau and got a nasal, uninterested woman who said she couldn’t release any information to me without a court order. When I started getting passionate about the fact that a murdered child was involved, and she realized I wasn’t going to go away, she told me I needed to speak to someone else, put me on hold (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, apparently played with one finger on a vintage Casio) and finally transferred me to an identical uninterested woman who went through the identical process.
Opposite me, Cassie was trying to get hold of the Dublin South-West electoral register for 1988—by which time I was pretty sure Sandra would have been old enough to vote, but probably not old enough to have moved away from home—with much the same results; I could hear a saccharine quacking sound telling her, at intervals, that her call was important to them and would be answered in rotation. She was bored and restless, changing position every thirty seconds: sitting cross-legged, perching on the table, swiveling her chair around and around until she got tangled up in the phone cord. I was blurry-eyed from lack of sleep, and sticky with sweat—the central heating was up to full, although it wasn’t even a cold day—and just about ready to scream.
“Well, fuck this,” I said finally, slamming down the phone. I knew Eine Kleine Nachtmusik would be playing in my head for weeks. “This is bloody pointless.”
“Your irritation is important to us,” Cassie droned, looking at me upside down with her head tipped backwards over her headrest, “and will be exacerbated in rotation. Thank you for holding.”
“Even if these morons ever give us anything, it won’t be on disk or in a database. It’ll be five million shoeboxes full of paper and we’ll have to go through every single fucking name. It’ll take weeks.”
“And she’s probably moved and got married and emigrated and died anyway, but have you got a better idea?”
Suddenly I had a brainwave. “Actually, I do,” I said, grabbing my coat. “Come on.”
“Hello? Where are we going?”
I spun Cassie’s chair around to face the door as I went past. “We are going to talk to Mrs. Pamela Fitzgerald. Who’s your favorite genius?”
“Leonard Bernstein, actually,” Cassie said, happily banging down her phone and bouncing out of her chair, “but you’ll do for today.”
We stopped at Lowry’s and bought Mrs. Fitzgerald a tin of shortbread, to make up for the fact that we still hadn’t found her purse. Big mistake: that generation is compulsively competitive about generosity, and the biscuits meant she had to get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam into a battered little dish, while I sat on the edge of her slippery sofa manically jiggling one knee until Cassie gave me a hairy look and I forced myself to stop. I knew I had to eat the damn things, too, or the “Ah, go on” phase could last for hours.
Mrs. Fitzgerald watched sharply, screwing up her eyes to peer at us, until we had each swallowed a sip of tea—it was so strong I could feel my mouth shriveling—and a bite of scone. Then she sighed with satisfaction and settled back into her armchair. “I love a nice white scone,” she said. “Them fruit ones get stuck in my falsies.”
“Mrs. Fitzgerald,” Cassie said, “do you remember the two children who disappeared in the wood, about twenty years ago?” I resented, suddenly and fiercely, the fact that I needed her to say this, but I didn’t have the nerve to do it myself. I was superstitiously certain that some shake in my voice would give me away, make Mrs. Fitzgerald suspicious enough to look harder at me and remember that third child. Then we really would have been there all day.
“I do, of course,” she said indignantly. “Terrible, that was. They never found hide nor hair of them. No proper funeral nor nothing.”
“What do you think happened to them?” Cassie asked suddenly.
I wanted to kick her for wasting time, but I did, grudgingly, understand why she had asked. Mrs. Fitzgerald was like a sly old woman from a fairy tale, peering out of some dilapidated cottage in the woods, mischievous and watchful; you couldn’t help half-believing she would give you the answer to your riddle, even though it might be in a form too cryptic to unravel.
She inspected her scone thoughtfully, took a bite and dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin. She was making us wait, enjoying the suspense. “Some mentaler threw them in the river,” she said at last. “God rest them. Some unfortunate fella who should never have been let out.”
I noticed that my body was having the old, infuriating automatic reaction to this conversation: shaking hands, racing pulse. I put down my cup. “You believe they were murdered, then,” I said, deepening my voice to make sure it stayed under control.
“Sure, what else, young fella? My mammy, may she rest in peace—she was still alive then; she died three year after, of the influenza—she always said it was the pooka took them. But she was fierce old-fashioned, God love her.” This one took me by surprise. The pooka is an ancient child-scarer out of legend, a wild mischief-making descendant of Pan and ancestor of Puck. He had not been on Kiernan and McCabe’s list of persons of interest. “No, they went into the river, or otherwise your lot would’ve found the bodies. There’s people say they still haunt the wood, poor wee things. Theresa King from the Lane saw them only last year, when she was bringing in her washing.”
I hadn’t been expecting this one, either, though I probably should have been. Two children vanished forever in the local wood; how could they have failed to become part of Knocknaree folklore? I don’t believe in ghosts, but the thought—small flitting shapes at dusk, wordless calls—still sent a bright icy chill through me, along with a strange twinge of outrage: how dared some woman from the Lane see them, instead of me?
“At the time,” I said, aiming the conversation back on track, “you told the police that three rough young men used to hang around the edge of the wood.”
“Little gurriers,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said with relish. “Spitting on the ground and all. My father always said that was a sure sign of bad rearing, spitting. Ah, but two of them turned out all right in the end, so they did. Concepta Mills’s young fella does the computers now. He’s after moving into town—Blackrock, if you don’t mind. Knocknaree wasn’t good enough for him. The Devlin lad, sure, we were talking about him already. He’s the father of that poor wee girl Katy, God rest her soul. A lovely man.”
“What about the third boy?” I asked. “Shane Waters?”
She pursed her lips and took a prim sip of tea. “I wouldn’t know about the likes of him.”
“Ah…turned out badly, did he?” Cassie said confidentially. “Could I take another scone, Mrs. Fitzgerald? These are the nicest ones I’ve had in ages.” They were the only ones she’d had in ages. She dislikes scones on the grounds that they “don’t taste like food.”
“Go on, love; sure, you could do with a bit of meat on you. There’s plenty more where those came from. Now that my daughter’s after buying me the microwave, I do make six dozen at once and put them away in the freezer till I need them.”
Cassie made a flatteringly big deal of choosing her scone, took a huge bite and said, “Mmm.” If she ate enough of them that Mrs. Fitzgerald felt the need to go heat up more, I was going to brain her. She swallowed her mouthful and said, “Does Shane Waters still live in Knocknaree?”
“Mountjoy Jail,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald, giving the words their full sinister weight. “That’s where he’s living. Himself and another fella robbed a petrol station with a knife; terrified the life out of the poor young fella working there. His mammy always said he wasn’t a bad lad, just easily led, but there’s no call for that kind of carry-on.” I wished, fleetingly, that we could introduce her to Sam. They would have liked each other.
“You told the police there were girls who used to hang around with them,” I said, getting my notebook ready.
She sucked disapprovingly on her dentures. “Brazen hussies, the pair of them. I didn’t mind showing a bit of leg myself, in my day—no better way to make the boys look, am I right?” She winked at me and laughed, a rusty cackle, but it lit up her face and you could see, still, that she had been pretty; a sweet, cheeky, bright-eyed girl. “But the getup on them young ones, sure, it was a waste of money altogether. They might as well have been in the nip, for all the difference them clothes made. Nowadays all the young ones are at it, with their belly tops and their hot shorts and what have you, but back then there was still a bit of decency.”
“Would you remember their names?”
“Wait now till I think. One of them was Marie Gallagher’s oldest. She’s in London these fifteen year, comes back now and again to show off her fancy clothes and her fancy job, but Marie says at the end of the day she’s only some class of a secretary. She always did have notions of herself.” My heart sank—London—but Mrs. Fitzgerald took a hearty slurp of her tea and raised a finger. “Claire, that’s it. Claire Gallagher, still; she never married. She was going out with a divorced fella for a few years, near gave Marie a heart attack, but it didn’t last.”
“And the other girl?” I said.
“Ah, her; she’s still here. Lives with her mammy in the Close, up the top of the estate—the rough end, if you know what I mean. Two childer and no husband. Sure, what else would you expect? If you go looking for trouble, you’ll never have far to look. One of the Scullys, she is. Jackie’s the one married that Wicklow lad, Tracy’s the one works in the betting shop—Sandra; that’s herself. Sandra Scully. Finish that scone,” she ordered Cassie, who had surreptitiously put it down and was trying to look as if she’d forgotten it was there.
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Fitzgerald. You’ve been a great help,” I said. Cassie took the opportunity to jam the rest of her scone in her mouth and wash it down with tea. I put my notebook away and stood up.
“Wait a moment, now,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald, flapping a hand at me. She stumped into the kitchen and came back with a plastic bag of frozen scones, which she pressed into Cassie’s hand. “There, now. That’s for you. No, no, no”—over Cassie’s protests; personal tastes in food aside, we’re not supposed to take gifts from witnesses—“they’ll do you good. You’re a lovely girl. Share them with your fella there if he behaves himself.”