Lying in Wait

by Liz Nugent

  Detective Sergeant O’Toole had been the person we’d been in touch with over the phone in the last few days, but none of us had met him. He was mid-thirties, a stocky build, but he had a shaving cut on his chin and one just under his left ear. I noticed these small things to distract myself from what I now knew was going to be bad news. I realized that if there had been good news about Annie, we would have been told over the phone. Mooney sat beside Detective Sergeant O’Toole on one side of the table and the three of us sat on the other. The table was old and battered, the size of a teacher’s desk. It looked like chunks had been carved out of it with penknives, and it had been graffitied with doodles of topless women and scrawls of ‘fuck the pigs’ and suchlike in pens and markers.

  The detective had a file open in front of him. I couldn’t see what had been written down, but I could see the photo of Annie. We had put it up everywhere we could – on lamp posts and in shops, pubs and church porches.

  Detective Sergeant O’Toole introduced himself as Declan and asked our first names. He looked me over a bit too long in a way that made me slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘Did you see me on the television last night? We’re taking this very seriously.’

  Ma had seen him interviewed, and treated him like a famous person. Me and Da had missed it because we’d been out looking for Annie.

  ‘Well now, to be honest I thought we’d get a better response, but I must say at the outset that we have not found Annie.’ A sob escaped from Ma. The tension was driving us all crazy. He ignored her distress and continued: ‘But we have made a few discoveries that I’m not sure you are aware of.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Did you know that your sister is a heroin user?’

  ‘She isn’t. I mean, she likes a drink but she wouldn’t go near drugs.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Da.

  ‘When we searched her flat, we found certain items under the mattress that lead us to believe that she is a regular user.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Ma.

  ‘Syringes, foil wraps, a ligature.’

  I was shocked. I knew about heroin addicts. You’d see them sometimes around our neighbourhood. They were all hopeless cases, living on the streets, begging for their next fix. I’d seen them with my own eyes. Annie wasn’t one of them. Ma said nothing but cried quietly.

  ‘She’s not like that,’ said Da, ‘she can be trouble all right, but she’s too smart for drugs.’

  ‘Gerry,’ said O’Toole, ignoring my ma’s distress, and I didn’t like the condescending way he said it, ‘did you know that Annie has been caught shoplifting three times in the last year? She’s been up in court. The last time, the judge said he’d lock her up if she came before him again. She is not living a good life.’

  Da went quiet then, but I was shocked and furious. ‘Why are you saying that? Annie’s not a thief! And she wouldn’t have the money for drugs. It’s not true, and even if it was, where is she? Have you done anything about finding her?’

  Mooney looked towards the ceiling, in embarrassment I think, while O’Toole continued.

  ‘She got the money from items she stole and then sold on to a third party … and’ – he coughed, but it was a fake exaggerated cough – ‘from other sources.’

  He reached out, put his hands flat on the table and addressed himself to Ma. ‘Pauline, we all have to be calm now. I admit that we don’t know where she is, but it seems that she had regular gentlemen … clients … over the last few months, and they might also have paid for her habit.’

  It took a few moments for the impact of what he was saying to sink in. Ma was still bewildered, but Da leaped up, sending his chair crashing backwards.

  ‘Are you saying my Annie is a prossie? Is that what you’re saying? Because I’ll break your face if that’s what you’re after hinting.’

  I pulled Da by the sleeve as O’Toole jumped out of his chair and pushed Mooney in front of him. Mooney moved behind Da, put a calming arm on his shoulder and spoke quietly. ‘Now, sir, we’re just dealing with the facts here to help us find your daughter.’ Da was breathing heavily, clenching his fists together, then pulling at his hair.

  ‘Da, please stop! Sit down.’

  He slumped back into his chair. O’Toole nodded at Mooney, who stood sentry beside Da. O’Toole leaned forward and spoke quietly.

  ‘I understand that it’s upsetting for you to hear this, but we looked into Annie’s background. We know that she spent two years in St Joseph’s. You sent her there yourself, Gerry.’

  Da put his hands over his face.

  ‘Now, I have to ask you a question and I want you to think hard before you answer it. Do you think there is a possibility that Annie might have taken her own life?’

  I didn’t have to think hard at all. ‘No, absolutely not.’ It had already crossed my mind, but Annie was optimistic on the last Thursday I’d seen her. She was upbeat and hopeful of getting money from somewhere. She had left no note. There was no body. Annie would not have done that to us. Despite the constant arguing with our da, there had always been some sort of a bond between them. She wouldn’t even have done it to him. Ma and Da readily agreed with me.

  ‘Not our Annie,’ Ma said.

  ‘Well, we can never rule it out and I’m happy to proceed with the investigation. However, as you might guess, the news coverage so far hasn’t proved very … fruitful. But I know a few people in the press who might be interested in the human angle of the story. Would you be prepared to talk to them this afternoon, if I was able to get them down here to the station?’ O’Toole was excited by this, I could tell.

  ‘Just me?’ said Da.

  ‘All of you.’ He nodded towards me. ‘Sure, it’s no harm to put a pretty face forward.’ He winked at me. I was disgusted.

  ‘And tell them that my Annie is a drug addict and a prostitute?’

  ‘Well, of course, there would be no need to reveal any of those more … troubling details. I’m just talking about a straightforward appeal for your daughter to come home. We have no evidence that any harm has come to her, but she may be in the company of some, shall we say, unsavoury types. It would just be you three talking to a few reporters, no big deal. None of the other … information would be released to them.’

  Detective Mooney looked at Da gravely. ‘I think it’s your best chance of finding her, Gerry.’

  We argued about it. Ma wanted to do it, but Da was reluctant. They had a massive row in front of O’Toole, and I was caught in the middle.

  ‘You were always ashamed of her,’ Ma said to Da.

  ‘Can you blame me, Pauline? I’m hardly going to be boasting about my junkie whore daughter, am I?’

  ‘So you’d be happy if she was dead in an alley somewhere, would you? You’d be happy if you never saw her again?’

  ‘No! I’m not saying that. I just worry about what happens next time she goes off on a bender. I’m worried sick, if you must know.’

  ‘She’s your flesh and blood. We have to find her.’

  ‘I agree with Ma. What if she’s in some bad situation? She’s not on a bender. If the people she’s with know that the guards are looking for her, they might send her home.’

  ‘We don’t even know that she hasn’t gone off somewhere –’

  ‘We do know, Da. All her stuff was still there. She wouldn’t have taken off and left her stuff behind.’

  We went back to the garda station in the afternoon. Dessie came with us, though he sat at the back of the room. I’d told him about the drugs and prostitution. He was utterly shocked. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, ‘I never knew she was that bad.’ He shook hands firmly with my dad, as if it were a funeral. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

  Da just glared at him. Da was still unenthusiastic about meeting the reporters, and Ma was really nervous. O’Toole said, ‘Don’t worry if you break down and cry when you’re talking about Annie,’ and I thought that was a strange thing to say because he was almost hinting that we should cry. Detective Mooney told us, ‘Just be honest,
tell Annie that you want her to come home.’ Da said, ‘I do want her to come home,’ as if the guard was challenging him. ‘It’s OK, Da,’ I said.

  We were brought into a bigger room with a big conference table and sat on one side of it with O’Toole. I couldn’t call him Declan. I noticed that he had had his hair cut since that morning. I guessed he didn’t give a damn about Annie and just wanted to be in the papers. He’d been so pleased with himself about being on the telly. When a photographer requested our photo, O’Toole jumped up and stood between us with his arms out, like Jesus in a holy picture of the Last Supper. A few men scribbled into jotters and clicked their cameras as Ma and Da talked about Annie. O’Toole looked meaningfully at me, urging me to say something, but I just sat with my head down and said nothing. I didn’t want to cry in front of strangers.

  I had information too that I had not shared with my parents; it would have hurt them too much. Earlier, before the press conference, O’Toole had taken me aside. He put his arm around my shoulder in a way that was supposed to be comforting, but I felt like gagging from the smell of his overpowering aftershave.

  ‘Karen,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything I can do, you know? I hate to see you suffering, like.’

  ‘Don’t you have any leads on where she went? Any clue as to what might have happened to her?’

  ‘Afraid not, but we’ve tracked down her pimp. He thinks she was seeing fellas on her own for the last few months. She wasn’t on the streets like she’d been before, but she seemed to have money for heroin. Sometimes, you know, a girl is better off with a pimp because he’ll offer her some protection.’

  ‘And did you arrest him?’

  O’Toole seemed perplexed. ‘For what?’

  ‘For being a pimp! Isn’t it illegal?’

  He actually laughed at me. ‘Now, don’t be getting upset, a pretty girl like you. Pimps are useful to us in other ways.’

  I was livid. ‘I bet they are.’

  He released me from his grip then. ‘I’m on your side, you know. I wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, if I were you.’

  I was shocked by how threatening he was. I needed to play along with him or he wasn’t going to help us.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that … I’m worried … we’re close, me and Annie.’

  ‘I suppose it hurts that she kept secrets from you.’ He rifled through his desk and pulled up a copybook, like an old school jotter. ‘We found this with the syringes under the mattress. It’s not of any use to us, but maybe you’d like to keep it?’

  I reached out to take it from him, but he held it aloft. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘Thank you, Detective Sergeant.’ I smiled sweetly.

  ‘Declan.’

  ‘Declan.’

  ‘She’s not great at writing, is she? Did she go to school at all?’

  I tried not to glare at him.

  ‘There’s some large cash amounts listed in there. We don’t know what they refer to. If you can shed any light on them, let us know? Prostitutes would never make that amount. The going rate averages at ten pounds for full sex,’ he said. He suggested that she must have been providing ‘very special services’ for the amounts listed in the notebook. It took me a few moments to understand what he was getting at. I thought of my sister, who I had shared a room with throughout my childhood. I was still trying to take in the fact that she might be a prostitute. He insisted that the addresses and phone numbers had all been checked and led to nothing.

  He wrote his own phone number on a piece of paper. ‘Ring me any time. Any time you want to talk.’

  ‘About Annie?’

  ‘About anything.’

  I recognized Annie’s scrawl at once. It was a diary of some sort. Her handwriting and spelling were terrible. But it was so … Annie, and when I read the contents, I felt sick. Sick about reading her personal stuff, but heartbroken for what she’d written. The first entry was a letter, dated shortly after she came home from St Joseph’s four years earlier.

  Dear Marnie

  I bet theve givin you a new name but youll allways be Marnie to me couse of that film. she was gorgues in that film and I think youll be gorgues like her wen you grow up. Your the mort buetifull thing I ever seen. I hope your new family are treeting you good. They wouldent tell me were you was going and I dint want to leave you but they said that Id be looked up their for ever if I didt sign the papers I wish I could have stayed and bawrt you home with me but my Da wouldn have it. He said i was a discrase to the famly. I dont want to be a discrase to you. I will come looking for you some day soone. I wish i new wher you are because I really miss holding you in my arms and cuddeling you. My sister asked me about you but i cant say anything becuse i am the bad one who left you behinnd and now I wish Id stayed and they hadnt sent you away. I am sorry with all my haert and i promise ill find you.

  There was a lock of soft, downy, almost yellow hair stuck to the page with Sellotape.

  As well as writing, there were things like cinema tickets pasted to the pages like a scrapbook, and random phone numbers, cash amounts and badly spelled hotel addresses. Some recent entries were listed with a ‘J’ on one side of the page and ‘£300’ on the other. I could make no more sense of it than O’Toole.

  After the reporters printed our interview, information came flooding in. Annie had been spotted in five different pubs and two restaurants in Dublin, working in a café in Galway, a hotel in Greystones, an office in Belfast. Countless possible sightings. Detective Mooney kept us updated, but even he admitted that they didn’t have the resources to follow up on every single call. Not properly. Me and Dessie chased up a lot of them ourselves. We took the bus and went to hotels and pubs and shops with her photo, but it was infuriating. It seemed like some of the people who had ‘spotted’ Annie just wanted to be part of the excitement of a missing person’s case. Their stories didn’t hold up, or they were contradicted by their friends. Often they were just people with problems of their own that wanted some attention. Each new lead excited us for a time, but none of them checked out.

  A week after our press interview, the muckraking began. New headlines appeared: ‘Missing Annie’s Heroin Addiction’ and ‘Annie Doyle’s Secret Teen Pregnancy’. There were vague references to gentlemen callers, and anyone with a brain could see what they meant.

  Da and Ma were distraught. Da and I went straight to see O’Toole. ‘How did they know? You said you wouldn’t tell them any of that private stuff!’

  O’Toole played the shocked innocent. ‘We’re launching a full investigation into how those details were leaked, Gerry. I can assure you, we’re just as upset as you are.’

  Detective Mooney, I could tell, was furious. His eyes blazed at O’Toole. I knew it was O’Toole who had done the leaking. After the press conference, I saw him and some of the reporters laughing and joking together. He posed for photographs with them. I was sure he would not hesitate to provide any dirty details they wanted. Maybe he told them to hold off for a week, so that the articles couldn’t be connected to him.

  To me, the tone of these reports seemed to imply that Annie deserved whatever she got, and if she was dead in a ditch, she had nobody to blame but herself. Even Dessie was upset by all the coverage. ‘It’s as if she doesn’t matter,’ he said.

  Within three weeks, everything stopped. No leads, no investigation. Gradually, the name Annie Doyle disappeared from the headlines. I guess nobody cared enough to really investigate the vanishing of someone like Annie. If she had been a posh rich girl without a ‘troubled’ history, they would not have given up so quickly.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of that first entry in Annie’s copybook. It had been written four years earlier, but the pain in that letter was obvious. What if she had travelled to St Joseph’s in Cork to find out where her baby had gone? What if something happened to her in Cork?

  I rang O’Toole.

  ‘Did you ask St Joseph’s?’

  ‘What?’ He didn’t appear to know what I was talkin
g about.

  ‘St Joseph’s in Cork, where Annie was forced to give up her baby.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I did, yeah.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘They didn’t have any information that would be helpful.’

  ‘But did they say she had been there? Had she gone down to find out where the baby was?’

  ‘Karen, a beautiful girl like you, all this worry is doing you no good. You have to leave this investigation to us. We’re doing everything we can.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Like, today. What are you doing today?’

  There was a pause before he said, ‘You know, Karen, patience is a virtue.’

  ‘I’d just really like to know what you’re doing to find my sister.’

  ‘Would you like to discuss it over a drink?’

  I hung up.

  I rang St Joseph’s in Cork. I didn’t know who I should speak to. The place was run by nuns. The woman who answered the phone identified herself as Sister Margaret.

  ‘I’m trying to find out if my sister visited in the last five weeks, please? Her name is Annie Doyle.’

  ‘And why would she visit here?’

  ‘She … she had a baby there in 1975. The baby’s name was Marnie. I have her date of birth, if that helps? She stayed there until December 1976, when she gave up the baby.’

  There was a rustling of papers then.

  ‘I see. Do you know what her St Joseph’s name was?’

  ‘No … I … what do you mean?’

  ‘All the girls who come here are given new names.’

  ‘Her name is Annie Doyle. She’s missing. I think the guards were in touch with you?’

  ‘Not that I recall. If you can’t give me her house name, I can’t help you.’

  ‘Wait, but don’t you keep records? Where did you send her baby? She might have gone looking for her.’

  A long silence followed.

  ‘I don’t know who you are talking about. Perhaps she went away because she was ashamed.’

  Ashamed. I bit my tongue.

  ‘Lots of girls in her position go away.’