One Bad Turn

by Sinéad Crowley

  ‘Alan was obsessed with Marc Gilmore,’ Michael Taft had said.

  ‘He was so pissed off – so annoyed at not having anywhere to live. He hated it. And he blamed the Gilmores. He said he didn’t blame his own mother, not really, because she was just stupid with money. But he said Marc Gilmore had basically stolen all of their money and he wanted to just say it to him. He wanted to ask him why.’

  But he’d never got to ask him, had he? Flynn flicked further through the witness statements. Marc Gilmore and his daughter had both spoken to guards on the day the young man disappeared, but had had little to say, other than that he had left the party, drunk, around 11 p.m. Gilmore senior had been in the bedroom the whole time and hadn’t seen him. If Flynn had been in charge of the investigation, he mused, he wouldn’t have left it there. It was hard to believe that the young fella could have left in such a distressed state and the only adult in the place wouldn’t have seen a thing. Then again, given that Alan’s body had been found so soon afterwards, he couldn’t really blame the guards from two years ago for not asking any other questions. There’d been the suicide note to consider too, or the post, or whatever you wanted to call it. What was it the chap had said again? He flicked back through the notes.

  I’m sick of this shit.

  Posted, according to his friend Michael, on a Facebook page his mother didn’t even know he used. Hang on, though. Flynn sat back in his chair. If Michael had known about the second Facebook page, who was to say he didn’t know more about his best friend’s internet usage? His contact details were in the file. Boyle and Gilligan were off trying to trace the contact Alan Delaney had had with his father. Maybe this dude could give them a steer.

  *

  ‘Ye must be Sergeant Boyle. Come in, please. I know you want to talk to our Michael and he’s right inside. I’ve told him now, if there’s anything at all he can do to help you he’s to do it.’

  Claire attempted to say, ‘That’s right,’ but didn’t bother finishing the sentence as Reena Taft bore her into the house on a stream of words.

  ‘And how is poor Eileen? They said on the radio she was critically ill, but you can never be sure, can you, what critical means? Oh, I don’t know, they’re saying all sorts of things about her in the paper, but I find it very hard to believe. She was a lovely woman – is, I should say – and she was devoted to poor Alan, God love him . . .’

  Only half concentrating on what the woman was saying, Claire allowed herself to be swept through a dark, wallpapered hall into an open-plan kitchen-cum-living room. Reena, sporting a variety of hair-dos and a selection of dark-eyed children, stared down at her from studio photographs on the wall, while in the corner a young man was hunched in an armchair, playing with his phone.

  ‘I mean, when we heard what had happened to Alan I couldn’t believe it, and that very day I told Michael he had to talk to the guards and—’

  ‘Mum.’

  The young man lifted his head and glared at his mother. He was blushing, Claire noticed, and the effect was heightened by the rash of angry red pimples on his cheeks and chin.

  His mother inhaled, as if to say more, then pointed Claire towards a large leather sofa positioned directly opposite her youngest son.

  ‘I’ll leave ye to it, so.’

  Reena Taft would have liked nothing more than to sit in on the interview, Claire could tell, but her son was well past the age of needing a minder. She could hardly be blamed for her curiosity, though. The noise surrounding the case was getting louder in every sense: it was the lead story on every news bulletin, on the front page of every paper and made up six of the ten currently trending topics on Twitter. The British media was interested now too: Claire had seen both Sky News and the BBC at Inspector Byrne’s last press conference and she hadn’t been surprised. Leah was young, female and pretty, and her liberal use of social media meant that myriad images of her were just waiting to be shared. She’d been lifted in broad daylight from a street near her home while out on a run. It was the scenario every woman feared. Fact was, Claire thought, most news, these days, was complicated. Wars, political heaves, financial turmoil. This story was simple. Bad man takes good girl. Stupid cops can’t find her.

  She pulled out her notebook and placed a small digital recorder on the arm of the sofa nearest the young man.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  He shook his head and flicked his phone to silent.

  ‘Grand, so. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me at such short notice.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  Michael Taft lifted one hand and raked a rather greasy fringe away from his forehead. He seemed younger than twenty, Claire thought, but then again, everyone under thirty looked young to her, these days.

  ‘You know why we’re here, Michael?’

  ‘Mum says it’s about that girl who’s missing.’

  His voice surprised her: a light, almost upper-class drawl. Michael Taft was at university now, studying law, and was clearly on a path to leaving this pleasant but undoubtedly working-class semi behind him. Another option Alan Delaney would never have.

  ‘That’s right. Your friend Alan knew Leah. You were very helpful when Alan disappeared, Michael. You told the guards all about his second Facebook page and how he’d met Leah Gilmore there. That was crucial to finding his body, so I’m wondering, was there anything else about his online activity we should know about? Something you mightn’t have thought was important at the time?’

  A frown flickered across the young man’s face, loyalty to Alan battling with his desire to do the right thing. Claire had anticipated this, and leaned forward.

  ‘I know you and Alan were very close, Michael, and I respect that. But he’s dead and Leah is alive and in terrible danger. It would be great if you could help us in any way. I’m particularly interested in finding out about his dad. Do you know when he first got in touch with him? Or how?’

  Michael ran his hand across his face, and sighed.

  ‘Yeah. I was with him, actually, when he figured out who his dad was.’

  Claire felt a wave of relief break over her.

  ‘That’s great, Michael, really brilliant. We’ve reason to believe Alan’s dad is implicated in this ongoing situation with Leah. So anything you can tell us about him would be very helpful.’

  The young man tugged at his fringe again.

  ‘Well, he traced him online. It was pretty clever, the way he did it. Alan was really good on computers, you know? Researching and stuff? He wanted to be a journalist when he left school but not like reading the news or any of that shit— Sorry.’

  As if she had time to be worried about bad language. Impatiently, Claire nodded at him to continue.

  ‘His favourite movie was this really old film, All the President’s Men. Have you seen it? That’s the sort of stuff he wanted to do, uncover shit people were trying to get away with and call them on it.’

  ‘So that’s how he found his dad? Researching online?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The young man grinned suddenly, his pride in his friend obvious to see.

  ‘It was brilliant, what he did – it didn’t even take him that long. I mean, all he knew was his dad’s first name and where he went to college. Oh, yeah, and his mam had told him once that they had met on the Aran Islands, the big one, Inis Mór, and that he was doing a course there. He was training to be a teacher. So that was all he knew, but that was all he needed in the end. He started with the name of the college. He knew the year they must have met obviously and he found this web page connected with the university for, like, alumni? They had this chat page for people who’d studied there and he did another search for the Aran Islands and the year, and the next thing he found this thread with people saying, like, do you remember the crack we used to have on those field trips, that sort of thing. Anyway, one person even put up a photograph—’

 
; ‘Hold on.’

  Claire had taken out her phone and was rapidly googling the information Michael was giving her. As she fired through various sites a memory came back to her, an earlier case, another woman in danger. She’d found what she was looking for then – could she do it a second time?

  ‘Is this it?’

  Using the information Michael had given her, she soon found the university in question, and its alumni page. Inputted ‘Aran Islands’ and there it was. A photograph, clearly a copy, taken on someone’s phone, of an original print. The picture showed a group of teenagers sitting on the floor, leaning into each other, beers in hand. They were all dressed alike in jumpers and jeans and even though, in her head, the late 1990s didn’t seem that long ago, this photo looked like it was from a different era. Claire turned her phone to Michael and he nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it! Shit, you’re as good as Alan was. That’s the photo he found and, look, there’s a discussion after it. You can see his message there.’

  Claire scrolled down from the photo and saw a message from ‘guest’.

  Hi I’m trying to find a guy called Richard O’Reilly who I think was in that class, played guitar. He was a friend of my mum’s – do any of you know him?

  Claire looked back at Michael again.

  ‘Is that his name? Richard O’Reilly?’

  Michael was smiling broadly now.

  ‘Nah, that was Alan’s idea, pretty clever, actually. He knew they probably wouldn’t give out names if they felt he was just, like, fishing, but if he made out like he knew what he was talking about it would be easier. And that’s exactly what happened – look!’

  Claire read on to the next post. Jesus, he was right – young Delaney had had a seriously bright head on his shoulders. And then a sudden stab: what a waste of a brain.

  The post was short, but the information crucial.

  There wasn’t a Richard O’Reilly in our class but there was a Richard Fallon, is that who you are thinking of? He was the guitarist. He did an H Dip in information technology after he graduated and I think he went to Oz after that, but I haven’t heard from him for a while.

  Claire didn’t have to imagine the excitement young Alan must have felt when he read that, because right now she was feeling the exact same way. She clicked out of the page and began googling furiously. The poster said he had moved to Oz, but she was a step on from that, as Sean Gilligan had confirmed his contact with Eileen had been from Perth.

  Richard Fallon, Perth.

  ‘LinkedIn – no. Facebook – no.’

  She could feel Michael staring at her as she muttered to herself.

  ‘He’s not stupid, he’s very tech aware, he wouldn’t have left that much of a trail. Twitter, no. Local news, don’t see anything – got him!’

  Her rapid typing ceased suddenly and Michael stared at her in amazement.

  ‘For real?’

  She grinned at him.

  ‘For real. I think so, yeah.’

  The site was an old one, the last post made almost five years before. A fairly amateur affair, it seemed to be based on the Rate My Teachers model, but applied only to schools in Western Australia, inviting students to leave comments about their teachers and give them a mark out of ten. It was the type of site, Claire knew, that had fallen out of favour as social media had grown more popular but which, through the magic of Google, still existed if you looked hard enough.

  She expanded the screen and read the words again.

  Richard Fallon – Information Technology and History was written beside a small generic cartoon of a male teacher wearing a mortar board. Underneath it were three comments.

  Decent teacher, gives too much homework, though.

  Bit intense, not many lolz but I learned a lot.

  And the third, the crucial one.

  Good teacher but flung me out of the class for saying I couldn’t understand his Irish accent. Sorry, sir!

  Claire took a deep breath. Australia was a big place, sure. But maybe, just maybe, it was small enough for her needs.

  *

  ‘Ah, that’s brilliant. See you later.’

  Philip Flynn replaced the phone and grinned. Nice one. Bloody nice one. His hunch had been correct. Young Michael Taft had proved just as useful a witness this time around as he had been when Alan had first disappeared. It was three in the morning in Perth, Australia, but already wheels were turning to try to find Richard Fallon, former IT teacher at Midhaven Grammar School, and Boyle seemed pretty convinced he was the guy they were looking for. Brilliant. The sergeant had even said he could knock off early if he wanted, while she waited for her Perth contact to get back to her. It was all good.

  Still, though.

  Flynn looked at the television screen in front of him, on which flickered images from one of the three CCTV cameras in Fernwood village. There were still three hours left in his shift and he’d no real desire to call it a day. The Perth thing was exactly the lead they had been looking for, but Leah was still missing, so there was no reason to shut down any other part of the investigation. Besides, with his injury, it wasn’t like he’d be able to do much even if he did leave the office early. Fact was, though, the real reason he wanted to keep going through the Alan Delaney file had nothing to do with any of that. Flynn wanted to keep looking at the notes because, quite simply, he felt there was something wrong about them, something that had been missed by the original investigating Gardaí. ‘Something’. If anyone else had said it he’d have laughed at them. But it was a niggle and it was there, and Flynn decided that even if the ‘something’ was nothing more than the product of the painkillers he’d been taking for his rib, well, surely it wouldn’t hurt to take another look.

  He rifled through the pages on the desk as the CCTV footage continued to play on the screen. There had been a decent online campaign when Alan had disappeared, but by far the most useful information the investigating guards had got about the case had come after Alan’s picture had been shown on the main evening news. Almost immediately an elderly woman called Abina Regan had phoned Fernwood Gardaí to say she’d seen a young lad answering Alan Delaney’s description at a bus shelter in the village at a quarter to one on the night he’d gone missing. Eighty-two-year-old Abina was being driven home by her daughter following a family wedding, and had been concerned about the boy, she told gardaí, because it had been pouring with rain and he’d seemed hopelessly underdressed for the weather. He’d been fiddling with his phone, she’d said, and she’d assumed he’d been trying to contact someone to arrange a lift. She had even asked her daughter to pull over and see if the lad was okay, but the daughter, presumably anxious to offload Mammy and get to bed herself, had said he might be drunk and that it wouldn’t be safe to talk to him in that state. Flynn hoped, for the sake of the daughter’s peace of mind, that she hadn’t dwelled too long on that decision, because it must have been shortly afterwards that Delaney had begun the climb up Kennockmore Hill. That was the sort of thing to lose you sleep, all right, he thought, and wondered if she had children of her own, and if they would ever be let out in the rain again.

  Anyway, after Abina’s statement had been logged, things had started to move very quickly. CCTV footage from the street outside a nearby fast food restaurant proved beyond doubt that it had been Alan Delaney who had walked towards the bus shelter, stayed for a while, then wandered off into the night.

  That information, with the I’m sick of this shit message he’d left on Facebook at 2.20 a.m. had led the guards to intensify their search along the south Dublin coastline and Alan’s body had been found three days later, trapped in an underground cave. The hood of his top had snagged on a rock. If it hadn’t been for that, he might have been washed up on Rua Strand earlier and at least spared his mother a couple of days of fruitless hope.

  Rua Strand. Flynn reached for the next document in the file
, a map of the area where Alan’s body had been found. Attached was a smaller-scale map of Kennockmore Hill itself. It was a beautiful area and he knew it fairly well: he and Diarmaid often took the DART out there on a Sunday, Diarmaid agreeing grumpily to climbing Kennockmore if Flynn promised they could go for a pint in Fernwood village afterwards. There were several ways to get to the summit. Flynn favoured what he considered the ‘real climb’, a decent hike that required you to haul yourself up and over rocks in places, but Diarmaid always insisted they take what he liked to refer to as the ‘civilized’ route, where you were more likely to encounter parents pushing three-wheeled buggies than serious hillwalkers. Or, indeed, you could drive most of the way to the summit if you really wanted to: there was a local access road on the opposite side of the hill to the sea, which left you with a fifteen-minute stroll to get to the spectacular views at the very top. With no CCTV on the hill it was impossible to tell which route Alan Delaney had taken, although he didn’t have a car, and no one had owned up to giving him a lift, which narrowed the options. What the guards did know, though, judging from a disturbance in a clump of bushes on the left-hand side of the hill, was the point from which he had fallen. The view from the top of Kennockmore Hill was stunning: on a clear day you could see Howth stretching away to your left and, usually, a couple of yachts or even the cross-Channel ferry out to sea in front of you. At night, however, it would have been a much bleaker place. Flynn closed his eyes, visualizing it. Had young Delaney seen the rocks on Rua Strand before he’d leaped on to them? What sort of desperation would it have taken to look down on their sharp edges and walk forward, to push out into the air? Courage, of a kind, he supposed.

  The post-mortem findings were devastating in their simplicity. Delaney had a head injury consistent with a fall onto the rocks. The lack of water in his lungs showed he had been dead before his body became submerged. Flynn hoped that meant he had been spared too much physical distress, and he knew the coroner would have stressed that fact to his mother too. Small mercies. Case closed.