The Ruin

by Dervla McTiernan

  The tea did make Aisling feel a little better. She felt sick all the time at the moment. Had since the day Jack died. Maybe she wasn’t eating enough. She tried to remember what she’d eaten over the past few days and failed – everything was a blur of tears and funeral arrangements. She stretched her feet out to the fire, wishing she could take her boots and wet socks off, then felt embarrassed by the banality of the thought. Was this what grief did to you? She felt disconnected from everything around her, an out of body sensation that came with double shifts and sleep deprivation, except that she was sleeping like the dead.

  The sandwiches arrived, and the smell of warm food made her feel sicker at first, then intensely hungry. They ate, and Mary talked. Hospital things. Gossip. There’d been some drama about hours – did she know? Someone in health services had been crossing out hours from timesheets, so that junior doctors were paid less. The union was onto it apparently. Such and such consultant was screwing a nurse in ICU, had she heard? Mary didn’t seem to need a response, and listening to her talk was oddly soothing.

  Mary finished her sandwich and sat back in her chair. ‘Will we get a drink?’

  Aisling shook her head. ‘Not for me.’ She gave another of her awkward-feeling smiles. ‘Not ’til I feel a bit more human anyway.’ What would drink do to her as she was at the moment? A glass of wine would probably have her sobbing on a stranger’s shoulder, and if that started, where would it end? ‘I think I just need to sleep, really. The last few days have been endless funeral arrangements and phone calls and cups of coffee.’ Her eyes dropped to the empty cup on the table. ‘The gardaí have asked me to go to the station tomorrow, for a meeting. For now I just want to go home to my empty house, put on a fire, lie on the couch and watch something stupid and comforting. Downton Abbey. Or X Factor maybe.’

  ‘Strictly Come Dancing,’ Mary said.

  ‘Christ, there’s no need to go that far.’

  Mary smiled. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  Aisling thanked her and said no. The truth was she didn’t know what she wanted. She desperately wanted to be alone, to be unobserved by anyone, and at the same time the thought of going back to the empty house and facing her life as it was now appalled her. But being with other people when you felt so vulnerable was tiring too.

  ‘Will you let me know if you need anything?’ Mary was asking. ‘I know it’s too soon, but if you need help with Jack’s stuff, or just want a bit of company, you’ll call me? I’m on for the next couple of days, but I could call over after work on Sunday, if you fancy a bit of company.’

  ‘I think I’ll go back to work.’

  ‘What? When?’

  ‘Maybe the day after tomorrow.’

  Mary was staring at her.

  ‘I have assessments. Surgeries. The last thing I need right now is to take time out of the hospital.’

  ‘But surely, you need to take some time. You need to grieve.’

  ‘What I need is to focus on my work.’ Aisling tried to remember what had been scheduled at the hospital for this week and couldn’t. She saw the appalled look on Mary’s face changing quickly to one of concern, and a wave of frustration and loneliness hit her. Jack would have understood.

  ‘Might be best not to rush it though. You know what it’s like in there. People will be full of sympathy for about an hour and then you’ll be under the pump again.’

  ‘I’m not looking for anyone’s sympathy.’ Aisling didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She was too tired to be polite. Too tired to say the things she was expected to say. She stood, picked up her coat. ‘I have to go.’ She paused. ‘Thanks. Thanks for the tea.’

  She didn’t wait, just turned and walked quickly to the door. She caught a cab home, and ignoring the piles of dishes, the week’s worth of laundry piled on the floor, fell into bed and into another deep and dreamless sleep.

  Friday 22 March 2013

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cormac spent the week working his way through cases he knew were likely to go nowhere. He could have delegated the work. But in reviewing the cases he’d felt that many of them had gone unsolved because they’d been approached in a half-hearted, haphazard way. It was almost certainly too late for most of them, but he didn’t want to close them until he was sure that everything possible had been done. The Hughes case had the most potential. First thing Monday morning Cormac had dropped the file on Peter Fisher’s desk, with instructions to clean it up and organise it. He’d spent the rest of the week chasing down tenuous leads on the other cases, expecting nothing but grateful to get out of the station for a few days.

  Friday saw him back at his desk, if not brimful of enthusiasm, at least relieved to be able to turn his mind to a fresh puzzle. The reordered Hughes file was waiting for him. Fisher had done a decent job. He must have taken the time to look at the case files Cormac had already been through; the file was now organised exactly as he liked it. The coffee-stained pages had been allowed to dry, and Fisher must have copied them before placing the new sheets into the file, because they were neat and unwrinkled. Fisher was ambitious, and didn’t try to hide it. He wanted out of the regions and into a specialist unit. He didn’t have much of a poker face, and it was clear he didn’t understand Cormac’s transfer. He’d all but asked if Cormac had done something to warrant a demotion. Specialist units tended to attract the talent, though the powers that be were trying to shake that up a bit. There was talk of devolution – of breaking up some of the units and resettling expertise back in the regions, keeping smaller, mobile specialist squads in Dublin. Cormac liked to think he was just ahead of the trend.

  He settled back in his chair, took a sip of coffee and started to read.

  Maura Hughes had been fifteen years old when she had disappeared in 1975. She had attended camogie training with her club, then got on her bike to cycle home. She never made it, and was never heard from again. Maura had been part of a close-knit rural community, she’d been a good student, and a beloved daughter and sister. A full-scale search had been launched less than twenty-four hours after her disappearance. Her body was never found and by 1977 she was declared missing, presumed dead.

  Cormac read quickly, skimming through statements from distraught parents and friends and glowing reports from teachers, and skipping over the ragged mess of disproved sightings. He stopped and read more slowly a statement taken four months after Maura’s disappearance. Maura’s best friend had come forward to say that Maura had been in a secret relationship. An older man; she didn’t know who. On the morning of her disappearance Maura had confided in her friend that her period was late, and she thought she might be expecting. She was going to tell her lover and they would run away together. Though Maura had never confessed the name, her friend was sure that the unidentified lover had been Timothy Lanigan, a twenty-two-year-old teacher at their school and the assistant camogie coach.

  The rest of the file told the balance of the story through a mix of reports, statements and local newspaper clippings – Cormac was not, it seemed, the first to review this particular cold case. Detectives had looked into Timothy Lanigan, and none too discreetly. They found no evidence of any relationship between Lanigan and Maura – the friend had based her theory on very little evidence. She’d once seen Maura get into Lanigan’s car (it wasn’t so much the taking of the lift, she said, as it was the fact that Maura never talked about it) and she was sure that Maura looked at Lanigan that way. Not much to base an investigation on, and nothing more had ever been found. Lanigan volunteered the fact that he’d once driven Maura home; he could remember time and date and was wholly unembarrassed about it. Other than that one time he claimed to have had no more interaction with Maura than with any of his students, and the gardaí were never able to prove otherwise.

  It didn’t stop Lanigan from being hounded out of town. An article in the local paper, printed after his departure, lamented the wrongs done to him. Tyres slashed. White paint poured over the driveway of his rented house. Shit through the
letterbox. Calls to the house in the middle of the night, abuse shouted down the phone when he answered. The school supported him, but in the end he gave up, handed in his resignation, and left the country. With his departure the investigation effectively ended. The phantom hand that had placed newspaper cuttings on the file must have also followed up on Lanigan in the States – there was a handwritten note to say that he was married, with a child on the way, and settled in Massachusetts. He was teaching English at a local high school.

  Cormac took Lanigan’s photograph from the file and studied it. It was black and white, not a mug shot – Lanigan had never been arrested – but a photograph taken at some school event. He was outside somewhere, and he was laughing, his hair a little long and tousled by the wind. Another photograph, this time a photo with his rugby team, Lanigan’s face circled in black ink. In both photos he looked very young, and very innocent. Cormac put the photographs away and flicked back through the file. No other suspects were ever identified, and for a while the popular theory had been that the friend had been right about the lover, though wrong about Lanigan, and maybe Maura and her secret man had run away together.

  Eventually her family would have accepted her death. He wondered how long it had taken. Ten years? Twenty? If Maura had lived she would be fifty-six now. Her parents might still be alive. She’d had a sister. It was clear from the file that they’d stayed in touch with the investigative team for years. Cormac found a photograph of the family, and looked at it for a moment, fixing the image in his mind before closing the file. It helped sometimes, to know who he was working for. He picked up his coffee, realised it was cold, and put it back down on his desk.

  Cormac stood, took his phone and left the squad room. He walked the length of the hall to the broad window that overlooked the carpark. It wasn’t a particularly attractive view. The river was less than a hundred metres away, but it couldn’t be seen from this angle. He sat on the windowsill and dialled Emma’s number. When it had rung five times without answer, he ended the call. Emma couldn’t bring her phone into the lab. Security protocols required her to leave all her personal belongings, particularly electronics, in a locker before entering the main facility. She usually checked her phone in her breaks, and called him back when she had time. He waited for a few minutes but the phone remained stubbornly silent.

  He was distracted by the sight of Danny arguing with a woman in the carpark below. Danny had a crumpled piece of paper, and he was gesticulating with it towards the woman. She was smaller than him, but she was clearly unintimidated. She held her ground, and whatever she said to Danny next seemed to calm him down. Cormac strained to make out who she was, and when she turned in his direction and started walking back into the station he thought he recognised her. From this distance her face was a blur, but her short, dark curly hair was distinctive. It was Carrie O’Halloran. Sergeant Carrie O’Halloran. She worked domestic violence, sometimes vice. Danny didn’t like her. He’d once warned Cormac that her looks were misleading. If she thinks you’re even looking in the direction of one of her cases, she’ll take your balls off with a pliers. But O’Halloran didn’t work drugs. So what did she and Danny have to argue about?

  When Cormac returned to his desk he went to find Fisher at the business end of the room. As he approached he could hear Anthony Healy, in full flow. He was talking to a very young garda reservist, who was standing with her back to Cormac, facing Anthony, and writing down everything he said as fast as she could.

  ‘Don’t go to the shitty place you went last time,’ Healy was saying. ‘I like my coffee hot, and strong. And can we, do you think, maybe find somewhere in this hole that makes a decent fucking sandwich? You’re a Galway girl.’ He looked her up and down. ‘You look like you’ve eaten a sandwich or two in your time. Do you know what, go to the Bierhaus and get me one of those banh-mi yokes they’re making down there. And a coke.’

  Cormac had reached the little group. Looking over the reservist’s shoulder, he saw she was struggling with the spelling of banh-mi.

  ‘No, no,’ Cormac said. He put out his hand and tapped her list. ‘There are two “l’s” in bollix.’

  Cormac let his eyes go straight to Healy, who couldn’t hide his flash of anger. The reservist flushed, and laughed. Trevor Murphy smirked, then looked disapproving. Fisher sniggered.

  ‘Reilly,’ Healy said. ‘Not bored of this place yet?’

  Cormac had never worked with Healy, but Cormac’s former unit and the Drugs Unit worked out of the same Dublin building, and he knew Healy by reputation. Healy was widely thought of as a bit of a wanker, someone with a bad case of small man syndrome. There were also rumours that he had a little more money than he should, suggestions that he might have taken a backhander or two in exchange for information. And now Healy was here, running a task force out of Galway, with Trevor Murphy as his little sidekick. His go-to man. What made things interesting was that Trevor was also the eldest son of the Superintendent, Brian Murphy himself. What did the Super think of his son’s close connection to a man with Healy’s reputation?

  Cormac raised an eyebrow at Healy, then gave Fisher the nod, and turned back towards his desk.

  ‘Of course,’ Healy said, smirk audible in his voice ‘You’re busy feathering the love nest, aren’t you? Must be nice. Has a few quid, I hear. Almost worth giving up your career for that.’

  Asshole. His relationship with Emma had started under difficult circumstances. Not many in Dublin knew exactly what those circumstances were, but a few had heard there was something. Someone like Healy wouldn’t be able to restrain himself from poking at it until he found out more. Cormac’s transfer off the Special Detectives Unit and back into regional operations had probably added fuel to whatever rumours were buzzing around.

  Cormac wanted to ask about Healy’s wife. It would have been an easy score; last he’d heard she’d buggered off to Spain, the day after their youngest left for college. It must surely gall Healy that his wife was enjoying the sun in the Costa del Sol, along with half the drug dealers he was still trying to put away.

  Instead he kept walking. Fisher caught up after a moment, and Cormac pretended not to notice his reluctant glance back to the men seated around the drug squad table.

  ‘I want your help on something,’ Cormac said, as he led Fisher back to his desk. He gestured to an empty chair and Fisher dropped into it, reassuming his eager-to-learn look.

  ‘It’s all right?’ Fisher asked, and Cormac blanked for a moment, before realising that Fisher meant the filing.

  ‘It’s grand,’ he said. If Fisher thought a neat filing job would impress, he had a long way to go. ‘I want you to have a go at tracking this guy down,’ he said, taking the photographs of Lanigan from the file.

  Fisher looked down at the photographs, then back at Cormac, as if checking to see if Cormac saw something he didn’t.

  ‘Didn’t he go to America?’ Fisher asked. So he’d read the file at least. One point in his favour.

  ‘Everything’s online these days, Fisher,’ Cormac said. ‘I doubt if you’ll even have to make an official enquiry. I want you to find this guy. Come back to me with a list of places he’s lived, schools he’s taught in, everything and anything you can find.’

  Fisher was nodding slowly, his eyes back on the photograph. ‘When do you want it?’ he asked.

  Cormac checked his watch. Nearly lunchtime. Over Fisher’s shoulder he saw Danny approaching, shrugging on his coat. Cormac stood, picked up his own coat.

  ‘Take the weekend,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what you have on Monday morning.’

  Danny led the way down the stairs. ‘Keeping Fisher from evil influences?’ he asked.

  ‘My good deed for the day,’ Cormac said.

  They reached the ground floor and made their way towards the main exit. As they passed the interview rooms Cormac caught a glimpse of a woman through an open door. Her head was turned away, but something about her jarred him. He stopped walking and tried to take a second look
just as Rodgers approached the door from inside the room, gave him a nod of acknowledgement, and shut the door.

  Danny had turned. ‘Problem?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought I recognised someone,’ Cormac said. ‘A woman.’

  Danny was studying him. ‘It’s important?’

  ‘It’s probably nothing.’ Cormac followed Danny out through the security door, then the double doors beyond, and into the fresh air.

  Cormac waited until they were out on the street, and walking up towards the city.

  ‘What’s going on with you and O’Halloran?’ he asked. Danny stiffened, looked like he might shrug it off, so Cormac continued, ‘I saw the argument in the carpark.’

  Danny let out a breath in frustration. ‘It’s just family drama,’ he said. ‘My sister Lorna.’ They walked on again for a minute or two, then Danny fished into his back pocket and took out an A4 sheet of paper that had been folded until it fit into the palm of his hand. He gave it to Cormac. Cormac unfolded it, and found himself staring at a missing person’s poster. A black and white poster with a photograph of a very pretty young woman, long dark hair, big fuck-you smile.

  ‘That’s Lorna,’ Danny said. He let Cormac study the poster for a moment, then reached out and took it back.

  ‘Mill Street is a bloody cesspool,’ Danny said. ‘It’s all politics, all the time, and I can’t get my head around who’s an ally and who’s an enemy.’ He gave Cormac a look. ‘If you haven’t been on the receiving end of it yet, you will be. They don’t like outsiders. I thought Mayo was bad, but Galway . . . Jesus, it’s like bloody Deliverance country.’

  ‘What’s happened with your sister?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Lorna’s gone on a skite,’ Danny said. ‘She does it all the time. Takes off with friends for days, doesn’t let anyone know where she’s gone or when she’ll be back. I think she likes it when Mam worries.’ Danny cast a sideways glance at Cormac. ‘It’s not that she’s a bitch, she just likes a bit of drama. I keep telling Mam to let it go. Lorna’s eighteen going on forty. She’s well able to look after herself. But Mam worries and the more she tries to keep tabs on what Lorna’s up to the bigger the fireworks.’