Distress Signals

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  We’d messaged Mary back, then later spoke to her for a few minutes over the phone. Next, we called Garda Cusack to tell her we had new information, and she agreed to move our planned Monday meeting up. Now it was Sunday morning, we were back in the same stuffy conference room in the District HQ on Angelsea Street and Cusack was not reacting to this the way I’d thought she would.

  In fact, she was barely reacting at all to the news that we had traced Sarah to a cruise ship in the Mediterranean.

  Cusack picked up the printout of the photo now, brought it close to her face, studied it. Put it down again. Picked up the passport, flicked through its pages. Stopped on one page. Raised an eyebrow. Rotated the passport to get a better look at whatever she’d seen there.

  ‘I found the, ah, friend, too,’ I said. ‘I got his number from Sarah’s phone bill. She isn’t with him. I have his number, if you want it. But I haven’t been able to get through to it since Thursday . . .’

  Cusack said nothing.

  ‘And she read the message,’ I pushed on. ‘The WhatsApp message I sent her? Its status is “read” now. I think she read it Wednesday night, or early the next morning. And we know for sure she called in sick to work, so—’

  ‘That’s good,’ Cusack said. ‘That’s all good news. But I’m a bit confused. What is it you think that we can do for you at this point?’

  ‘Well, we need you to confirm that she was on the ship,’ I said, swallowing the word obviously. ‘We called Blue Wave but they won’t give out any passenger information. They must know where she got off it. When she got off it. Who she was with. Whether she reported to them that her passport had been lost or stolen while she was there. Or maybe she had an accident or got sick during the cruise and had to be transferred to a hospital.’ I felt Maureen react beside me to this scenario. ‘You could find out who owns the phone number, the one for Sarah’s . . . friend. Find out who it’s registered to. We can’t do that ourselves.’

  ‘I’m not sure we can do that either,’ Cusack said. ‘You said Sarah isn’t with him?’

  ‘She’s not with him now, no—’

  ‘What about the police in Nice?’ Maureen asked. ‘And the consulates? You said you were going to check with them. Have you heard anything? Has Sarah been to any of them? When are you actually going to’ – Maureen’s voice rose – ‘start doing something about finding my daughter?’

  Jack put a hand on his wife’s arm. I couldn’t tell if he was ­comforting her or silencing her.

  ‘I know this is difficult for you,’ Cusack said gently. ‘And confusing. But as I explained when we first met on Friday, we don’t go looking for every capable adult who goes somewhere without telling anyone else. We don’t send out search parties for people who turn off their phone. And we don’t open missing person cases unless there’s a real concern that the person who can’t be contacted has come to harm, could come to harm or has plans to harm themselves. I don’t see any evidence for any of that here. And that’s a good thing.’ She exhaled. ‘Now, let me tell you what I do see . . .’

  An Gardaí, it turned out, had their own names for things. We sat and listened while Cusack translated the events of the past week into GardaSpeak.

  Sarah telling work she was sick, telling me she was going to a conference and not telling her parents anything at all became purposefully misleading loved ones about her whereabouts. Withdrawing six hundred and fifty euro (the odd three euro, Cusack explained, was the foreign ATM transaction fee) was having means and withdrawing cash instead of using her card was concealing her movements. And the new haircut meant it would be difficult, if not impossible, to locate a photograph that accurately reflected what Sarah looked like now, which in GardaSpeak was actively taking steps to disguise her appearance.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sarah wouldn’t do this to us. She just wouldn’t do it. I know her. She wouldn’t leave us, leave us feeling like this.’

  ‘You told me yourself, Adam. She saw the WhatsApp message. It was marked as read. Presumably she saw all the messages you’d been sending her, potentially read the emails and listened to the voicemails as well. She got them all and she chose not to respond to any of them.’

  ‘There has to be a reason for that. Maybe she can’t respond.’

  ‘But she can go on a cruise?’

  I didn’t answer that.

  ‘We’ve contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs,’ Cusack said, ‘and we will send a bulletin to Interpol tomorrow morning. But that’s all we can do in this situation. That’s all we should do, based on our review of it. And that’s a positive thing.’

  ‘You keep saying that,’ Maureen said, ‘but I still don’t know where my daughter is.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’ I asked. ‘Are you seriously leaving us with Facebook?’

  ‘Actually . . .’ Cusack cleared her throat. ‘You might want to consider what may happen if you continue to appeal to the public – especially online – for help in contacting Sarah. People will find out about her last-known location, and you know how quickly the tide can turn. You hear “cruise ship” you . . . Well, you think holiday.’

  ‘Holiday?’ Maureen was incredulous. ‘Holiday?’

  Jack shifted in his seat.

  ‘What about the passport?’ I asked. ‘If she’s on holiday, how is she going to get home without it? And who sent it? The writing on the envelope wasn’t hers.’

  Cusack picked up the passport again, opened it to a middle page and turned it around so I could see what was stuck to it: an airline luggage sticker, the kind you use to trace a suitcase if it goes missing.

  ‘This luggage tag has “Cork” on it,’ she said. ‘If someone found this – after Sarah lost it – they could easily use social media to track down the Sarah O’Connell who looks like the photo in it and who lives in Douglas, Cork.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ I said sarcastically. ‘And figure out her address how, exactly?’

  ‘She’s in the phonebook.’

  ‘The . . .’

  The phonebook? How? I didn’t even know they still made those.

  ‘It’s just a checkbox whenever you get a landline installed,’ Cusack explained. ‘Did Sarah set up your phone or broadband account, by any chance?’ I nodded. Sarah set up everything because, more often than not, she was the one paying for it. ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘There must be hundreds of other Sarah O’Connells living in—’

  ‘Her Facebook page is set to public, and she’s checked in at your apartment complex in the past. It wouldn’t take a detective to figure it out.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Maureen muttered.

  ‘But what about the note?’ I asked. ‘How does that fit in if that passport is returned lost property?’

  ‘Block capitals. Non-distinct. Signed with an initial. It could be—’

  ‘It’s her writing. I know it is.’

  ‘I know you believe—’

  ‘It’s hers. I’m sure.’

  ‘Fine,’ Cusack said. ‘Let’s pretend for a second that the note is from Sarah. And that the passport is too, even though I can’t think why she’d post her own passport home ahead of her. Whenever we do launch a missing person investigation, we have one of two goals. If we believe something has happened to the missing individual, we want to find out what that was. If someone else was responsible for it, we want to apprehend them. If we think the individual has left of their own accord, then our end goal is to make contact. Contact is always what we’re after, either directly between us and them, or between the missing person and their family.’

  Her eyes flicked to the passport.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘If this is from Sarah, then that’s what it is: contact. I don’t believe it is though. I believe this is, to use your words, returned lost property.’

  ‘But we still don’t know where Sarah is. Or
how she is. If she’s okay—’

  ‘You have no right to know. I realise that’s tough to hear and probably impossible to accept – for now, anyway – but Sarah is a grown woman. This may not be the nicest thing to do, yes, but she’s perfectly within her rights to do it.’

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ Now my voice was rising. ‘You’re talking about someone I don’t know. A stranger. An alien. I don’t recognise Sarah in any of the things you say. She wouldn’t do this. She couldn’t do this.’

  ‘But she has.’

  I turned in surprise to the voice who’d said that.

  Jack was looking at Cusack, pushing his chair back from the table.

  ‘We understand,’ he said to her. ‘Thank you for your time.’

  He stood up to go, motioned for Maureen to do the same. She looked helplessly from him to me to Cusack, then back to Jack again.

  ‘But Sarah,’ she said to him.

  ‘Come on, Maur. Let’s go.’

  I stood up too. ‘Jack, what are you doing? We have to find—’

  ‘How do you think we feel,’ he spat at me suddenly, ‘having to tell everyone that our twenty-nine-year-old daughter ran away? Putting her mother through all this. Not to mention what she was up to before she flew off to Spain for herself. Spain and France. Wake up, would you, son? The girl is on holiday. Jesus Christ. It’s like the bloody Peru 2 all over again. I don’t want to know where she is or what she’s doing. I don’t care. This . . . This embarrassment stops now.’

  The so-called ‘Peru 2’ were a pair of young women who’d been reported missing from the island of Ibiza a year or so before. The family of one of the women had launched an appeal for information, one that had spread from Facebook to mainstream media outlets. Her face was everywhere alongside pleas from her loved ones, who said she would never go a week without calling home. An Gardaí, meanwhile, were conspicuously absent. Then, a week after the story broke, the Department of Foreign Affairs found their ‘missing person’ imprisoned in a Peruvian jail, charged with smuggling something in the region of €1.5 million worth of Class A drugs into the country, hidden in packets of food. The appeal – and the girls’ family – instantly became the butt of Internet jokes.

  ‘She doesn’t deserve us looking for her,’ Jack said. ‘She doesn’t deserve us full stop. Now come on, Maur.’

  Maureen stood up, her eyes on the floor.

  ‘Thanks again,’ Jack said to Cusack. ‘Sorry for wasting your time.’ He took Maureen’s arm and together they started out of the room.

  Cusack looked to me. ‘I know this is difficult—’

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest.

  I walked out too.

  Around seven-thirty Tuesday morning I heard the tell-tale clunk of the front door as it was pulled outwards by someone entering the corridor from the stairwell. I was already standing in my hallway, waiting, ready to go. The car keys jingled in my hand.

  ‘I would shout “Road trip!”,’ Rose said when I opened the door, ‘but it seems inappropriate.’ She was holding two take-away coffees; she handed me one. ‘You ready to go?’

  I’d come straight home from Angelsea Street the day before and, after I’d told my parents what had happened with Cusack, convinced them that I needed some time to myself. My father had had to literally push my mother out of the door, but they’d eventually left.

  I’d got straight to work, trying to get someone in Blue Wave to talk to me about Sarah.

  I needed to know when and where she’d got off the ship. Well, first I needed them to confirm that she’d been on it in the first place, and then I needed to know when and where she’d got off. I’d never been on a cruise. Did you have to wait until the end, or could you get off before that? What about the days when they stopped places? Could Sarah have got off and stayed off then? Would there be a way to tell? What about The American? Had he been on the cruise too? Was he home already? Had they shared a cabin?

  When was any of this going to start making sense?

  I’d already spent much of Saturday calling every telephone number I could find on Blue Wave’s website, sending tweets to their corporate Twitter account and even live-chatting online with something called a Customer Experience Ambassador – an experience so futile that I think I was either interacting with someone who couldn’t stray an inch from a limited script of prepared responses, or merely generating automated answers based on keywords in the questions I’d asked. Time and time again I’d been told that passenger information was confidential. Under no circumstances could they give any of it out.

  After our second visit to Angelsea Street yesterday morning – and the realisation that, if I wanted to find Sarah, I was going to have to do it alone – I spent another few hours trying to penetrate Blue Wave again. I was getting nowhere until, just before eight last night, an exasperated call centre employee who must have been nearing the end of her shift told me to put my request for information in writing.

  And then gave me an address to send it to.

  The address was a business park on the outskirts of Dublin. Blue Wave, it turned out, had their European headquarters in a business park two and a half hours’ drive up the motorway.

  Wouldn’t it be harder to dismiss me in person?

  I’d been debating whether or not to go when Rose and Moorsey had knocked on the door, having come straight from work and bearing Chinese take-away. Moorsey had already filled Rose in on what had happened at the meeting with Cusack.

  I’d asked her what she thought.

  ‘About Jack having a tin can for a heart?’

  ‘About Sarah being on a cruise.’

  ‘Well’ – Rose pushed a clean plate towards me, started pulling cartons out of a brown paper bag stained with grease – ‘in all the time I’ve known her, Sarah never even mentioned such a thing. I mean, Sarah on a cruise? Stuck in an enclosed space full of retirees, cabaret shows featuring X Factor rejects and all-night excess-calorie buffets? Does that sound like something she’d be into?’ Rose shook her head. ‘No, not the Sarah I know.’

  ‘That’s just it though, isn’t it? Who is the Sarah we know?’

  ‘I think,’ Moorsey said with a mouth half-full of chicken curry, ‘it’s safe to say she was on the ship. The flight to Barcelona, the one-night stay in the hotel, the logo on the note – and Mary Maher’s story. It all fits. It would be too big a coincidence otherwise.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rose said. ‘But what was she doing on there?’

  ‘She was with him,’ I said. ‘The American. I think we can assume that much. But then they went their separate ways for some reason. After the cruise. If we knew where Sarah got off the ship, we’d know where they separated. We’d know when. But Blue Wave won’t tell me anything. They keep transferring me around and saying passenger information is confidential.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Moorsey asked.

  ‘Well, their European headquarters are in City West.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s a business park just outside Dublin.’

  Rose raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re thinking of going there?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it, yeah.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘We can go tomorrow. I’ll take a day off work.’

  It was just as well that she did, because I’d never have found their offices otherwise. City West was a sprawling maze, a well-­manicured campus of nondescript glass blocks, busy signage and endless roundabouts. We got there just before ten on Tuesday morning and drove around in circles until Rose spotted a tiny brass nameplate affixed to the front of an office building we’d just gone past.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘Didn’t that say something about Blue Wave?’

  I stopped, reversed a few feet.

  ‘“Blue Wave Tours”,’ I read aloud, peering at the lettering. ‘“Your friends at sea.�
�’

  Afraid we’d never find it again, we abandoned the car in the nearest empty space – Blue Wave’s employee car park – and headed inside.

  Just before we did, I checked my phone for new messages.

  ‘That’d be amazing timing,’ Rose said when she saw me. ‘Wouldn’t it? If she called right now and said, “Hey, what’s up? Oh, sorry. I meant Tuesday. I’m at the airport right now. Come pick me up.”’

  I said, ‘Yeah,’ because it was easier than admitting that we were way past misunderstandings now.

  The lobby was a mess. Bare cement floor was exposed, presumably awaiting the plastic-wrapped roll of carpeting that was propped against the wall in one corner. Framed pictures of the company’s fleet of cruise ships were stacked on the floor. They all looked the same to me: enormous, top-heavy and unlikely to float. All the lobby’s furniture – a reception desk, a blue coffee table, six scratchy blue chairs – were pushed to one side and covered in a fine layer of grey dust. The only sound was a radio talk-show, playing at low volume from an unseen speaker.

  The receptionist looked surprised to have someone to receive. She smiled, apologised for the mess. They were in the process of rebranding, she explained.

  ‘This is a corporate office,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested in travelling with us, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place. I can give you a number to call though.’ She reached for a neat stack of business cards atop the reception desk.

  ‘My girlfriend is missing,’ I said. ‘The last place we know she was for sure was on one of your ships, last week. Is there someone we can talk to about that?’

  The receptionist’s mouth fell open.

  ‘Let me just, um, make a call,’ she said, recovering quickly. ‘Please, take a seat.’

  We did as we were told. The receptionist – her nametag said Katy – left us waiting for more than fifteen minutes. When she returned she took our names, a few details about Sarah and the cruise we thought she’d been on.

  Then she disappeared for another half an hour.

  When she came back a second time, she asked if we happened to have Sarah’s passport number. I was still carrying the Ziploc bag with the passport and note around with me, and so was able to provide it. Katy seemed thrown by this at first, but then carefully copied down the number. After that, we were plied with cups of coffee and left waiting once again, this time for over an hour.