In Deep Water

by Sam Blake

  ‘Vijay’s uncle wasn’t sure about showing me the MoneyGram dockets.’

  ‘Understandably.’ O’Rourke rolled his eyes, ‘We’d have some fun trying to get a warrant to look at them.’

  Cathy scowled at him. She knew he thought she was wasting her time, but they had to look at everything, and she wasn’t about to be put off. She continued, ‘There’s money going all over the place – to Belarus, Romania, Moldova, Nigeria, Brazil.’

  ‘Big spread.’

  ‘I . . .’ Cathy started to say she’d taken a photo of the MoneyGram docket that Vijay’s uncle had told her the girl had signed when Sarah Jane was in the shop, but thought better of it. He didn’t want her wasting time chasing down that line of enquiry. The money was being wired to a mobile phone account in Belarus, so until she found someone who spoke Belarusian, assuming that’s what they spoke there, and was prepared to stick their neck out to try and contact the receiver, there wasn’t a whole lot she could do. Cathy wasn’t even sure where Belarus was, let alone if the person at the other end would talk to them but Cathy just had a feeling.

  There seemed to be a lot of money leaving the country through these companies. Vijay’s uncle had said they got all sorts of people in, that they’d stopped taking transactions unless they felt the sender actually knew the person receiving the money personally. They’d had too many men coming in to ask about sending money to girls in the Philippines or Russia, who they only knew online. He’d shaken his head as he’d explained to Cathy, astounded that it had never occurred to these men that the stories they were being told might not actually be true. But online fraud wasn’t Cathy’s problem right now, she had other things to worry about, like where the hell Sarah Jane was.

  ‘So what do we think Sarah Jane was working on that her dad thought was dangerous? He still out of comms?’

  Cathy shifted on the window sill, pulling at her necklace. She stuck her free hand in the pocket of her combats. ‘Yes, his boss at CNN said he’s investigating something to do with jihadi brides, they’re trying to reach him but they can’t expose his position – ISIS are monitoring all transmissions, so they can’t just ring him up.’

  ‘And what do we know about what Sarah Jane was working on?’

  ‘Last time we spoke about it, she said she was writing an article on the urban cowboys that hang out around Ballymun, near college. She wanted to develop it and do her thesis on them.’ O’Rourke raised an eyebrow as Cathy continued, ‘She was asking about the kids that keep the horses. She was always talking about the cycle of poverty and education, reckoned if kids had hope they wouldn’t offend. That’s one of the reasons McIntyre opened the Phoenix gym there – he teaches loads of the inner city kids to focus on fighting in the ring instead of on the street.’ Cathy hesitated, thinking, ‘Sarah Jane was fascinated with the horses.’ She spoke slowly, reaching into her memory for their conversation. The last time they had discussed it had been a week ago at least. Cathy had been delayed getting to the canteen, had been checking something with her lecturer. As she’d arrived, dumping her files onto the table they always sat at, right in the corner, Sarah Jane had been packing up for her next lecture. Typically working while she was eating, her laptop had been open – she’d been googling images of boys riding bareback in Ballymun, across Keane’s Field between the flats.

  ‘Keeping horses? Abusing, more like.’

  Cathy snapped back to O’Rourke, to his office, to the gold fountain pen he was fiddling with. ‘That as well. You’d think a dog would be an easier pet to keep, wouldn’t you?’

  O’Rourke sat back in his chair, ‘You have to feed dogs, pay for dog food. Horses eat grass. Plenty of that for free. I don’t understand why the council haven’t impounded them. It’s open ground.’

  ‘McIntyre says it’s private land. Some developer who was brought up in Ballymun owns it, lets the lads keep their horses on it. He’s built them some sort of stable, apparently, down at the bottom corner.’

  Cathy started playing with her pendant again, ‘If we had her laptop we’d be able to see who she’d interviewed. She’s a detail person, makes lists of everything.’ Cathy paused, ‘Can the lads check to see if she backed up her files? I think she told me she used a cloud server, Carbonite? We’ll probably need a US warrant but they might be able to help?’

  O’Rourke nodded, ‘Will do. Can take a while but we’ll give it a go.’

  Cathy continued, ‘God knows how we’ll find out who she was talking to though – those lads aren’t exactly chatty. The minute they see us coming they’ll clam up.’

  ‘Can McIntyre help?’

  Cathy nodded, ‘I’m sure he could – they trust him, he’s part of the scenery up there, knows everyone.’

  ‘So give him a call, see what he can dig up. I’ve got the technical guys up at headquarters to see if they can access her email, might give us a lead.’ O’Rourke put his pen down.

  ‘Don’t they need her password?’

  ‘Gmail’s pretty secure, but they have their ways. Do you know it?’

  Cathy shook her head, ‘She used an encryption site for everything – for her Gmail, websites and stuff, she has this notebook she keeps them all in, changes them regularly. And before you ask, it’s not in her room, I checked.’

  ‘Handy. Do you think she actually talked to any of the kids, the lads with the horses?’

  ‘She wanted to. I’ll see what The Boss can find out.’ Cathy moved from the window to the chair on the other side of O’Rourke’s desk, perching on the edge of it. O’Rourke rolled his eyes.

  ‘Could you stop fidgeting? You’re starting to wind me up now.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Cathy put her elbows on the edge of the desk, rubbed her face with her hands. She felt like a spring that had been pushed down flat, all pent-up energy. She needed to get back into the gym. Cathy sat back in the chair, ‘A lot of those kids are working for dealers, collecting and delivering.’ Cathy frowned, ‘Sarah Jane’s a journalist and is downright nosey. She could have asked too many questions in the wrong place.’

  O’Rourke rolled his eyes again.

  ‘Feck off, I’m not that bad. Sarah Jane ferrets around all sorts of stories, I stick to . . .’

  ‘Murders?’

  ‘Well maybe.’

  O’Rourke’s tone was serious, his look searching. Cathy shifted sideways in the chair, uncomfortable under his gaze, ‘Sarah Jane’s really sharp. You know she is.’ She paused, screwing up her face, looking out of the window. The rain was running in streams down it now. Cathy spoke slowly, half to herself, ‘If we only knew who she’d been talking to . . .’ She closed her eyes and ran her hand into the roots of her hair, pulling the curls.

  O’Rourke’s voice cut through her thoughts, ‘I think you need to give McIntyre a call, then get out to Ballymun and talk to those kids, show her photo around, see what gives.’

  14

  ‘So when is the next shipment due?’ Rebecca Ryan pulled a biro out of the pot beside the till and scribbled a note on the pad beside her. ‘I hope everything was checked this time, I’m not paying for damaged goods.’ She paused. ‘Grand. Cash on delivery as normal.’ She smiled into the phone, ‘Nice doing business as always.’ She hung up and shuddered. Her supplier was pretty unpleasant to deal with on a good day, but at least she didn’t have to meet him very often. He stank of cigars and hair oil, could never understand that she was the one in charge, that she called the shots, that she wasn’t just some bossy manager. Not that she cared much about that once everything ran smoothly – he was reliable, that was the important thing.

  Sometimes she wished she’d applied that logic to her marriage. Jacob’s dad was an idiot, one of the worst kinds, who had never cottoned on to the fact that it wasn’t his level of intelligence that had made things happen for him.

  Putting the pen down, Rebecca looked critically at the rails beside the till, her mind whirring. With every shipment she needed to focus on where the cash was going, making sure the books bal
anced. Running a business looked glamorous from the outside but it was all about keeping the balls in the air, all of them, and sometimes that was exhausting. Today her word in her journal had been ‘organisation’. She had yet to persuade Jacob to tackle his bedroom but she was optimistic. Moving anything in his room required intense negotiation unless he took it into his head to reorganise the space, and then she’d walk in to see what he was doing, to find his toy cars lined up in size order at a thirty-degree angle on his dresser and the clothes that usually populated the floor in a big pile on the top landing.

  Rebecca smiled to herself at the thought and stretched; it had been a long day, and a busy one. One of the mums from school had been in and – Rebecca couldn’t resist another smile – had ended up struggling out of the door laden with turquoise paper bags. She’d come in looking for something to wear with her jeans at some corporate weekend away and had ended up with the top plus new jeans and a couple of outfits for the evenings. It was some business event her husband was involved in, and she needed to make an impression. Rebecca knew the value in making her customers look amazing, and this mum had looked incredible. Her husband would get a shock when he saw the credit card bill, but Rebecca knew he’d be showing his wife off and she’d be telling people where she shopped. This might be a tiny boutique in a village in County Wicklow, but Rebecca had achieved a national reputation – partly due to her ex-husband being a society darling and her poster boy, but also because she knew who to dress, and a few free outfits on the right people when she was starting out had gone a long way.

  Rebecca twirled the biro through her hair. One thing she loved more than anything else in this world was making money. Money gave her strength, it bought power and opportunities. It opened doors and would ensure Jacob never had anything to worry about.

  Her year in Spain had taught her an appreciation for the finer things in life, and that being the one in control was key; not to mention the contacts she had made and the knowledge she had gained to set up on her own. She often laughed to herself at her naiveté when she’d gone to Spain. Her plan had been to earn a bit of cash to set her up when she moved to LA to find her way into film or TV, and she could earn more from a summer on the Costa del Sol, getting a tan into the bargain, than she could working for minimum wage in Quinnsworth. Times had been tough in Ireland then – even finding bar work was difficult, especially when you were overqualified and had no intention of staying. She’d seen the ad for English-speaking staff at a five-star resort outside Puerto Banus, the type of resort where the super-rich hung out in the security of an enclosed environment where there were no paparazzi and a guarantee of discretion.

  She’d started as a waitress, and within weeks was a hostess in guest services, efficiency quickly promoting her to manager. She’d seized the moment and ensured her guests wanted for nothing. The tips had been incredible and she’d ended up staying much longer than one summer, just over a year in fact, and had made some powerful friends and connections.

  Rebecca knew that she was stronger now than she’d ever been – her driving force was wanting to give Jacob everything she’d never had as a child. The estate she’d grown up on had been tough. Their three-bedroom semi had had an outside toilet and a back boiler – the hot water generated by the fire her mother lit every morning in the living room hearth. It was like something out of the 1950s.

  She’d worked hard in school, got all the As she needed to attain her goal: getting out.

  Leaning on the counter, layers of turquoise tissue paper cushioning her elbows, Rebecca looked out at the village. Despite the gossips, this was exactly the type of place she’d dreamed of growing up, out in the country where you could leave the house and find woodland and mountains literally on the doorstep – not waste ground, burned-out cars and discarded needles. Where the air was clean and your neighbours were bankers and artists, not dealers and junkies.

  And Jacob loved it here. She’d never taken him back to his grandparents’ house, to the place she grew up in, but she would one day. Both her parents were dead now, had been killed in a car crash soon after she’d got back from Spain. She’d stood at their graveside, the wind whipping her hair across her face, chilling the straggle of mourners to the bone, and she knew that now she really needed to make it on her own, and exactly how she was going to do it.

  ‘Mummy.’ A voice behind her interrupted her. ‘It’s 5.21, what’s for tea?’

  Turning around, Rebecca smiled. ‘It’s 5.21 is it? Are you hungry already? What would you like, my darling?’

  Jacob grinned and shoved his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on her, big, round and deliberately innocent, ‘Pizza?’

  Rebecca looked at him knowingly; he was some chancer, she wondered where he got that from. ‘You know we only do takeaway at the weekends.’

  ‘It’s not takeaway, they deliver it, you don’t have to go and get it, you just have to call them.’ He held up the cordless landline, the gap in his teeth appearing as he smiled.

  Rebecca looked at him, wavering for a second. She was hopeless where he was concerned.

  ‘Please, Mummy.’

  She grabbed the phone from him playfully. It had been a good day, and it wouldn’t hurt this once.

  *

  Upstairs, TV on, the pizza box open on the low oak coffee table in front of them, Rebecca reached for her glass of wine. Jacob liked the lights turned down low, so apart from a brass lamp over in the far corner, the fire was the only source of light, the flames jumping over the Farrow & Ball ‘New White’ walls of the living room. She’d kicked off her shoes onto the African tribal rug beside the coffee table and was now curled up on the sofa next to him. Munching pizza, his eyes were fixed on the TV and he was distracted enough to lean back on her, to let her cuddle him.

  She knew he saw things differently to everyone else, that the colours and sounds of the programme caught his attention sometimes more than the content. When he was much smaller she’d taken him to a birthday party – it hadn’t been her best idea, the noise and craziness had been overwhelming, but he’d focused on counting the balloons, on the number of each of the colours. His perception of things was so different to hers, but that’s what made him amazing, gave him his brilliant memory, his ability to draw, to remember facts like they were his friends’ names. They’d been in the supermarket the other day and he’d started telling her about eggs, about how chickens produced extra bones to provide calcium for their eggs but crocodiles didn’t. Or people. Then he’d looked speculatively at a toddler having a meltdown, ‘a moment’ as Rebecca thought of them – they’d had a lot of those – and he’d said, ‘Why do people have children when you can adopt them pre-made without having any vitamin deficiencies?’

  When she’d finished laughing she hadn’t really had an answer to that one. She smiled again now, remembering it. He could be absolutely hilarious with some of the things he came out with.

  Jacob reached for another slice of pizza as the Six One News came on, a Garda call for assistance in a missing persons case the first item.

  ‘Irish American Sarah Jane Hansen is a journalism student at DCU and works at The Rookery restaurant on South William Street. She got a taxi home to Dún Laoghaire on Sunday night and . . .’

  Jacob stirred beside her as the missing girl’s photo was flashed onto the screen.

  ‘That’s wrong. She had her hair tied back. Like Daniella does, in a plait.’

  Her glass halfway to her mouth, Rebecca froze, stunned. ‘How do you know that, honey bun?’

  Jacob munched on his pizza, his eyes trained on the screen. He spoke with his mouth full, ‘I told you. On Sunday I was on single player and my battery ran out. I was coming in to tell you.’

  ‘I remember that bit, darling, but how do you know about the girl’s plait?’

  Jacob took another bite. ‘She was in the car park where you parked. She got into a Discovery with an army man. She had a long long plait like Danni, the one like a fish tail. She said it’s hard
to do. I was getting out of the car to go in and tell you about the battery but they came past really close, so I waited cos I didn’t want to get flattened.’

  Rebecca’s mind whirred, but keeping outwardly calm she took another sip of her wine. Jacob told the truth without wavering, so there was no doubt in her mind that if he said he’d seen the girl, then he had. And he wouldn’t have any hesitation in telling other people. He didn’t have internal brakes, the natural sense to know when to speak and when to keep quiet, often piping up in completely inappropriate circumstances. She still cringed at the memory of walking around the supermarket – he’d seen an overweight lady with a basket full of ready meals and started on a long explanation of the calorific content of prepared food and the symptoms of diabetes at the top of his voice.

  So if this missing girl came up in conversation at school, or anywhere, he’d be totally straight about telling people he’d seen her, and he’d end up being the centre of attention, and he hated that.

  Rebecca flinched at the very thought – the other kids would be asking questions, no doubt fascinated that he could be a crucial witness in a national news story, one that had actually been on the TV. She could see him surrounded in the playground, faces looming all around him, voices probing, drowning him in a cacophony of sound. He’d be trapped, unable to tell them to give him space, to communicate that he couldn’t cope with being crowded, unable to answer the questions, to even filter the questions in order to answer them. The noise and the jostling and the excitement would be a sensory overload and he’d have a total meltdown.

  And this was Enniskerry, the village where an American girl, Annie McCarrick, had vanished in 1993. The minute it was out that he’d seen the girl who had disappeared, the gossips would have a field day, and everyone would be cross-examining him, even the teachers, she was sure. He wouldn’t understand it at all. Here, of all places, a missing American girl could end up being the sole topic of conversation for weeks. Her mind worked fast, assessing the options, running over the possibilities. She couldn’t bear for him to be upset, and something like this could be catastrophic. It had taken so long to settle him in school, something like this could blow that sky high – school refusal was an ongoing problem for parents with children on the spectrum. Unable to verbalise the issues, to understand, let alone explain what was upsetting them, school became just too scary and unmanageable for kids who were often extremely intelligent, and gifted in so many ways.