The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  We look up to see a familiar, swaggering form coming through into the garage. Cathal Deasey stands behind his brother, protective, a little subservient.

  “Can I help you?” Niall Deasey is older, but he’s still handsome, his hair salt-and-pepper now and his blue eyes lined, alive, curious. He gives us a broad, welcoming smile, an absolute fake. “Problem with your car?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Roly says with a smile. “I’m Detective Inspector Roland Byrne, with the Guards in Dublin. I don’t know if you remember, but I had a chat with you a good few years back now—twenty-three, actually—about an American girl named Erin Flaherty. We had a witness who saw you talking to her in the Raven in Dublin not long before she went missing.”

  Deasey doesn’t say a word.

  “Do you remember meeting her?”

  “That was twenty-three years ago. I’ve chatted to a lot of people, men and women, in the last twenty-three years.”

  He’s been looking at Roly, but suddenly he shifts his eyes to me and I can see him start. It’s very subtle, but I think he’s recognized me. He looks away quickly and says, to cover the awkwardness of the moment, “Can you give me a date at least? Perhaps I could check my calendar.”

  “This would have been in the summer of 1993,” Roly says.

  Deasey pretends to think, tapping an index finger against his forehead in a way that makes me want to haul off and punch him. “I don’t think so. Nope, I don’t remember that.”

  “What about a German woman named Katerina Greiner?” Roly says it quietly, trying to catch him off guard.

  He looks confused. “What?”

  “Do you have any memory of meeting a German woman named Katerina Greiner, around 1992 or 1993?”

  “No. I wouldn’t think so.” He looks confused. “You remember who you met twenty-three years ago, detective?”

  “When was it you moved back to Arklow?”

  “Three years ago. My ma was sick.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother. That must have been tough,” I say. That gets him. He gulps and looks me right in the eyes, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Where were you on May twenty-first and twenty-second?” Roly blurts out. I look over at him. He’s not supposed to be asking about Niamh.

  “What, last week, like? Or back in 1993?”

  “Last week?”

  “Saturday? I was here, working on cars or out on calls. We’ll often get called out on Saturdays, tourists with car trouble, like. And then I was probably at the pub with my brother, Cathal. That’s where you’ll often find me.” He calls through to the back of the garage. “Cathal, come on out. We were at the pub, yeah? Saturday night last weekend?”

  Cathal Deasey comes through, wiping his hands on a rag. “Yeah,” he says. “It was Petey’s daughter’s twenty-first, wasn’t it? We were all there most of the night. Anyone at the pub would tell you.”

  Niall Deasey grins triumphantly.

  “You finished?” he asks us. “Because if you are, I’d like you to get the fuck out of my garage.”

  Roly walks right up to him, doesn’t touch him, but looks right into his eyes. “If you know anything that could help us find out what happened to Erin Flaherty, you better tell me, Niall lad. Because there is no shortage of paperwork on you back at my office and I can pull out any one of the fifty things I think you’ve done and I can work those cases until I get something that will stick. You hear me?”

  Deasey draws himself up and I know he’s about an inch away from hitting Roly. I start to move forward but so does the brother.

  “Niall,” Cathal says quietly.

  Niall Deasey turns and holds his gaze for a minute and then shrugs. “Lookit. We met her at the Raven like you said. Wasn’t anything to it, really. Just a chat at the bar. She was a lovely girl. Had a bit of a flirt. Bought her a drink. We left and we never saw her again or heard anything about her until that one”—he doesn’t look over at me—“chatted up my little cousin John down the pub. I didn’t put it together, the resemblance, until she’d already been chatting with us for a bit. I remembered her, your cousin, because of the accent and because a few months later I saw the bit about her on the SixOne. But I don’t know anything about her. Okay?”

  Roly stares at him for another long moment. I can smell the tension in the air, sweat and gasoline and metal.

  “All right, then. You take care, Niall. We’ll be back to you soon.”

  “That’s it? You’re not going to arrest me for doing fuck-all?”

  “Not today. See ya.”

  * * *

  Roly waits until we’re in the car. “So?”

  “Either he doesn’t know anything about Erin or he’s so sure we don’t have anything that he wasn’t thrown by us showing up unannounced.”

  “Yeah, I thought so, too,” Roly says. “Something about him bothers me.”

  “He recognized me, all right. I could see it immediately. So his pretending he didn’t at first was just posturing. He was keeping something from us, I’m just not sure what.”

  Roly puts on the radio in the car and we listen to a breathless story about the searches ongoing at Robert Herricks’s house in Baltinglass. “The family of missing woman Niamh Horrigan waits as the searches continue,” the radio announcer says. I can tell it’s driving Roly crazy not to be there as things heat up.

  “I can check that alibi anyway,” he says suddenly. “At the pub.”

  “Yeah. He sounded pretty confident though. But he said he was out on calls during the day. Maybe he had a window in there?”

  We’re back in Glenmalure by five. As we get out of the car, we can hear the distant chop-chop of a helicopter overhead. “Aerial searches,” Roly says.

  Mrs. Curran’s house looks strangely desolate as we approach it in the dusky twilight. There’s a light on somewhere in the back, and the yellow glow of it illuminates the house in the darkness.

  A small, pudgy man is standing in the doorway. He’s wearing sweatpants and a black T-shirt with purple writing on it. His hair is long and thin, gathered in a little ponytail that hangs over one shoulder.

  We introduce ourselves and follow him into the house. It’s not until he’s under the light in the living room that I can see he’s dying, too. His skin is yellow, his eyes bloodshot, and what I took for pudginess is actually bloat. Liver? Kidneys? Hepatitis? Whatever it is, it’s bad.

  I say, “Mr. Curran, you spoke to the police around the time of my cousin’s disappearance. You said you didn’t meet her and you didn’t know anything about what happened to her.”

  He shuffles a bit farther into the room. “I guess. It was a long time ago. There’s another one now, in’t there? I saw it on the telly.”

  “Here, can we go inside?” Roly asks.

  We get settled in the sitting room. Mrs. Curran is on the couch and I can’t tell if she remembers us.

  Roly asks Gary Curran, “Does the name Katerina Greiner mean anything to you?”

  He shakes his head. “No, don’t think so.”

  “Do you remember a German woman, a woman who had an accent, anything like that, around the time Erin Flaherty went missing.”

  “No,” he says. But his eyes widen suddenly.

  “What does the German woman have to do with it all?” Mrs. Curran asks. “What did she…?” She gasps then, and I see pain flash across her face.

  “She needs to rest,” the nurse says, glaring at us. “I can give you something, Mrs. Curran.”

  I stand up and take my coat off the arm of the chair to show her I’m going. But I watch Gary Curran’s face and I’m aware of Roly next to me. “Mr. Curran, is there anything you can tell us that might help us? You worked for the forestry service, for Coillte, in 1993, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you use a spade? In your work?” I hold my breath.

  “Yeah.” He shifts his weight from foot to foot and I can see that standing is making him uncomfortable. “That was my job, digging holes
.”

  The nurse moves toward me and I glance at Roly. He nods. Go for it. “Mr. Curran, if there is anything you can tell us, we would really appreciate it.”

  “Sorry. My mother is tired.” He turns and walks out of the room. I can hear his footsteps disappear into the front of the house. His mother looks up at us, confused.

  “Mrs. Curran,” I say, “we’re going now. It was lovely to see you again. I’m so sorry you’re not well.”

  She tries to smile, but waves instead. I can see in her eyes that the pain’s got her. “Yes,” she says. “Nice.”

  Gary Curran is waiting for us in the hallway.

  “I’m sorry about your illness, too,” I tell him.

  He frowns. “It’s hepatitis. I got it from a needle in Thailand.”

  Roly’s uncomfortable. I can feel it, but I force myself to stay calm.

  I gamble. “Your mother knew something about my cousin’s disappearance. Something she didn’t tell me. Can you tell me what it was? It might be very important. They can’t do anything to you now, the Guards.” I glance at Roly. “They won’t do anything to you. You know that. I’m so sorry you’re ill, but you could help us solve this. I don’t know if I can describe how much it would mean to my uncle, and to me, to know what happened.”

  The nurse makes a cluck-clucking sound behind me. There’s a mechanical humming somewhere in the house. Raindrops are pinging on the roof.

  He looks up at me and I can see his impulse to lie overridden by something else. He shrugs, as if to say, What does it matter now? And he starts to talk.

  “I followed her. I used to do that, when I was younger. I got in trouble for it and my mother knew. She was very … She tried to stop me from doing it, but she couldn’t always. The girl, your … cousin. She left the house pretty early and I watched her out the window.”

  He takes a deep breath. Just that much has worn him out.

  “She walked down towards the lodge and I thought that I had to go to work anyway, so I would just walk that way and I could follow her. I could … watch her through my binoculars. I liked to do that, I had a whole … If I tried to explain, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “So you followed her?” I can feel it, the knowledge that what’s coming next is important.

  “Yes. She walked down by the lodge and the bus came in. I thought she was going to get on it, but she didn’t. She kept walking up the Military Road. Fast. I followed her. I had my spade and everything so if anyone came I could pretend that I was working. And I watched, I watched her walking toward the walking paths, like. And—” He breaks off and lets out a terrible rattling cough. When he picks up again, his voice is hoarse. “I kept following her. She kept going up the path, like she was looking for someone or something.

  “I knew a place where I could sit and watch her, away from the path. And when I got up there, I saw her walking away from the path, off into the trees. But then there was a man. I think he must have followed her up, too, and I watched him coming towards her on the path, waving like he knew her. They talked for a little bit.”

  “And then?” I’m holding my breath. This could be it.

  “I don’t know because I stopped looking.”

  “Why did you stop looking?”

  He takes a deep breath.

  “Because someone was coming.”

  Something clicks in my brain. Someone was coming.

  He sits back on the couch and runs a hand through his hair. There’s a thin film of sweat on his face.

  We’re all silent. I can feel Roly and me waiting.

  “It was a girl. She was talking to herself. In some other language. At first I thought there were two people and I put the binoculars away and started digging but she came up the path and it was just her. There was something wrong with her. When she saw me, she gave me a really weird look and muttered something and kept walking. I waited until she was gone and then I dropped my tools and tried to find your … your cousin. And I couldn’t, so I went up a bit higher but I still couldn’t find her.”

  Roly says, “Was she German? This girl you saw?”

  “Might be. Yeah, I think that was the language. I don’t know for sure.”

  “When did you hear that Erin was missing?” I ask him.

  “I don’t remember. Mam said the Guards came to see her and she asked if I had seen anything. I couldn’t tell her, could I, because then she’d know I followed her. But I think she knew I had seen something. The Guards interviewed me.” He looks up at Roly. “You interviewed me, but I couldn’t tell you because then I would have to tell you I followed her. That would have gotten me in trouble.”

  The nurse steps forward and hands him a glass of water. He looks exhausted, spent. We don’t have any more time with him.

  But we need to push him a bit further. “What did the man look like, Mr. Curran?” Roly asks. “Had you seen him before? What did he look like?”

  “I’d never seen him before. At least, I don’t think so. I never really got a look at his face.” I feel my stomach drop. “He had dark hair. He was pretty tall, and he was wearing something brown, like a brown tweed jacket, or maybe leather. That’s all I could see.”

  I lean forward and try to meet his eyes, but he keeps looking down at the ground. “Mr. Curran, when you went back, was your spade still there?”

  “No,” he says. “It was gone. I had to pay for a new one out of my wages.”

  43

  TUESDAY, JUNE 7,

  2016

  Roly and I find a pub on the road back toward the coast. The fire is burning, it’s warm and welcoming inside, but the two of us just sit there dazed for a few minutes.

  The television is on over the bar and the announcer is talking about a banking scandal involving the trading of mortgages. They run a clip of a gray-haired man leaving court and then the newscaster says, “As gardaí search properties in and around Baltinglass, County Wicklow, the family of missing Galway woman Niamh Horrigan is calling on Wicklow residents to try to remember anything that might help to find their daughter and bring her home safe and sound.”

  Niamh’s parents are shown talking to a reporter, who asks them: “Do you feel the authorities are doing enough to find Niamh? There have been some problems with the investigation that you have found worrying, isn’t that correct?”

  “We do thank them for all they’re doing, but it’s been seventeen days now and Niamh is still missing.” The mother begins to cry and the father finishes for her: “If there’s anyone out there who knows where Niamh is, we just want to say that we don’t care what might have happened, we just want our daughter back. She is such a kind and good person. All of the children she teaches love her so much. If you talk to her, you will see that—” Now the father’s crying, too.

  The screen cuts to a shot of the reporter standing in front of a small house that I assume belongs to Robert Herricks. “Gardaí will continue to search for Niamh, and her family will continue to wait and hope.”

  Who?

  Who was the man on the trail?

  Who?

  “Whoever the man was, he must have killed Katerina Greiner,” Roly says. “Do you realize how close Gary Curran was to witnessing the murder?”

  “And he may have killed Erin, too,” I say. “It was someone she knew, and it sounds like she wasn’t expecting to see him on the trail.”

  “Except she was back in Dublin on the eighteenth,” he says.

  He’s right. I’d forgotten. I can feel everything in me resisting the thought. She was back in Dublin on the eighteenth.

  Roly’s looking at me, not quite meeting my eyes.

  “Let’s start with who the man was. Who knew she was going down to Glenmalure?”

  I say it before he can. “Conor, if she told him.”

  “But we don’t know if she did.”

  I keep going. “Emer said she didn’t tell her and Daisy.” I tell him about my coffee with Emer. “I don’t think they were hiding anything else. If she was in touch with Ni
all Deasey, then Deasey knew. And if she was in touch with Hacky O’Hanrahan, then he knew. Really, anyone who she might have told. The bus driver knew where she was going, obviously.”

  “Okay,” Roly says slowly. “Okay. Let’s think this through. According to Gary Curran, she left the bed-and-breakfast and she walked toward the lodge. The bus came in but she didn’t get on it. Instead, she kept walking up the Military Road and onto the Wicklow Way.”

  I drain the hot whiskey I ordered and let it seep in, slowing my heart rate. There’s something banging at my memory, something I missed; it’s there, but not quite there. I close my eyes. When I open them, Roly’s watching me. “That sounds like she was meeting this guy, whoever he is, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Roly drains his drink.

  “Roly, let’s say something happened on the trail. The guy kills Katerina Greiner and then he forces Erin to go back to Dublin with him and get money and they flee … somewhere.”

  “But then it’s some guy we don’t know anything about. Because there’s no missing guy.” He’s antsy, snapping at me. I can feel the weight of the days on us. Seventeen days.

  Our food comes—fish and chips for Roly and potato-leek soup with salmon and brown bread for me.

  “What are you going to do about Conor?” he asks me while we eat quickly, barely tasting the food.

  “I don’t know. He lied to me. All this time he was lying.”

  Roly takes a long drink, avoiding my eyes. Then he says, “You don’t … you don’t think it was him, do you? Does that mean anything to ya? The brown jacket, like?”

  “The man on the trail? I don’t know. Conor had a motorcycle jacket, brown leather. Back … then. But he had an alibi.”

  Roly doesn’t say anything.

  I say, “His girlfriend, the woman he married was his alibi. She may have lied to protect him.”

  “Yeah, but.”

  “Right,” I say. I get up to use the restroom and on the way back, I stop to look at the walls in the hotel’s lounge area. The red-and-white wallpaper is covered with historical memorabilia and information about important Wicklow sites in the 1798 rebellion. There’s something about Cullen’s Rock, near Glenmalure, where there was a famous battle and where the rebels holed up in the mountains in 1798 and were later hanged.